Slideroll.com's Demise and Rockin' Slide Shows for the Blog with OneTrueMedia.com!

A week ago, I really wanted to embrace this piece of webware....but can't. Both my students and myself had problems with this online app for making slide shows. In my last post, I noted that it has many impressive features. It still does. At first, I felt it was pretty good, but overall, the webware has some reliability issues. Glitches exist when trying to get back into slide shows you've not yet finished. Many of us using it got messages to log in after we'd already logged in. If the webware can't see that you're logged in, you get access only to the demo mode in the slide show creator portion (not good). I had a heck of a time getting back into slide shows that I produced days earlier to get the embedding code for my blog. Guess this is the bottom line - -- Slideroll has some great features, but it is not as user-friendly and reliable as I really want it to be. That is enough to send me looking for another alternative -- and what a find I've got next to tell you about! I told my students that maybe it was for the best, because we might have not have found and tried this next gem without the frustrations of Slideroll.com.

Enter Onetruemedia.com. This was the alternative we went to after acknowledging that Slideroll.com wasn't cutting it for us on this project. I had seen it only once before, but had not the real time to take it for a whirl. After having used it extensively (see one of my end projects using it), I am hooked, as are many of my students!! So many nice features to list, and, have to let you know, many of my students like it better than Animoto.com because of it's intuitive feel, speed, features, ultimate control -- and yes -- firm reliability! This online app for making slide shows has a really friendly, easy to use interface, especially the storyboard area where you stage the order of your slides. Important for us was finding webware that would allow us to program each slide's duration so that we could get that emotional feel established via text or pictures. This program has it. Additionally, it comes with a handful of nice slide transitions, a large list of free music, the ability to upload purchased ITunes music (a student shared this find with me -- I've yet to try this feature) and the ability to create text slides on the fly as you work (though the default font size is a bit small -- and you find that to make your font larger on your text slides you have to upgrade to their premium service). And, this service lets user integrate video along with pictures -- something I'd not seen in other similar online apps. Does it have any flaws? Well yes -- my slide show was a bit choppy when loading for the first time on my blog, but hey, it's a 3+ minutes slide show, so I expected a bit of streaming issues (do wish it would stay on the preloader just a little longer so as to avoid streaming "jerks"). Also, while you have the ability to add text captions to images, you have to upgrade (i.e. "pay") for that service just as you have to pay for enlarged text on text slides. But reliability, speed when creating a project, and choice of features are not among the list of flaws at all! Was so impressed at how I could have about 15 students working on this online app at the same time in our lab and it still cranked along nicely without getting the 'ol bandwidth choke. Projects save nicely, embed into Blogger nicely and most of all, let students tell the digital story they want because of its features. Would rate it a 9/10!! Still hope to post in a few days regarding how Animoto.com performed for us.