Today, Google released a new collaborative tool , Google Presentation, to round out its suite of products. During our Lower School and Middle School opening Faculty Meetings, I showed teachers Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets which can be used by students as substitutes for Microsoft Word and Excel. These are tools that would allow students to work via a web browser, which would allow for students to work both at home and school without the need to have the application on either computer or emailing work back and forth. It also would allow for students to collaborate on documents together, which opens up a range of possibilities.

To see an example of Google presentation, you can take a look at this presentation created by a group of teachers today (http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?fs=true&docid=ah4zsdj46b66_578cv4x7#)

Google Presentation is their first attempt at provide users the ability to create slide shows via a web browser, making a presentation application independent. This first attempt does have limitations. There are no transitions and limited templates, although this may be an advantage, since in most of the projects, students can spend more time look rather than content. At this point, you export the presentation into a PowerPoint format.

Advantages to this is that a project can be simultaneously edited. You can import PowerPoints, but there may be other solutions which may be better, such as SlideShare. It does keep a history so you can revert to a previous version.

Like the other collaborative Google Apps, Docs and Spreadsheets, I am guessing that this product is not finished and that additional enhancements will be added in time.

I think that his will be worthy of  use in many of current uses and the ability to collaborate will make this a powerful tool.