My name is Sophia Guevara and I am the Special Libraries Association Information Technology Division (SLA IT) Chair and American Evaluation Association Social Network Analysis Topical Interest Group Co-Chair. At SLA IT, I currently lead the Executive and Advisory boards. In an effort to bring the members of these boards together, I asked that the board work collaboratively on presentation using Google Slides in order to showcase the accomplishments as a team.
Rad Resource: Google Slides
I chose Google Slides as I had experience collaborating with others using the Google Docs tool. Creating a slide document was quite easy and after developing introductory slides, I inserted blank slides for each member of our executive and advisory board. This was done to provide each participant with an opportunity to share his/her accomplishments over the past few months. Using Slides’ sharing option, I emailed an invite that provided edit access to each board member.
Rad Resource: Freeconferencepro
Once the presentation was developed, we used Freeconferencepro to deliver the presentation in conjunction with Google Slides. For those who are unaware of this tool, it provides you with an opportunity to develop slides for free either by yourself or with others you choose. This allowed board members, conference attendees, and others to access the information without regard to where they were located. In addition, for those that were unable to attend this meeting, Freeconferencepro’s recording option allowed me to develop a meeting recording that others could view at a later time.
Lessons Learned
The project required several follow-up reminder emails encouraging each board member to complete his/her slide. In these reminders I included a link to view the presentation, however, this seemed to confuse some who let me know that the link provided gave them no permissions to edit. The lesson learned was to send a reminder with a link with edit permissions so that it wouldn’t confuse those that were being reminded to complete their slide.
With that being said, one board member indicated that while he did not have experience with Google Slides prior to this project, he had previously used Google Docs and found that it was very similar. In addition, after the experience, his opinion of this tool was that it was an “effective way to communicate main points of a discussion or reports” and that the combination of Google Slides and Freeconferencepro was an effective way to share information among a distributed group.
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