SlideRocket statistics – lessons our students need to learn?

I’ve been extolling the virtues of SlideRocket for some time now. For the past year and a bit I’ve been using this online presentation tool and I’ve been really impressed with what you can do with it. But I know I’m still no expert. There are plenty of features I haven’t found time to explore yet.

Last week I embedded a presentation I gave about Ning onto a wikispace site I have and this blog. Since then a couple of other people have embedded it into sites they have too. I made the presentation for public viewing and allowed for the code to be embedded should people want to use it. The other day I remembered that you could view the statistics for your presentation. In other words, you could see how many times it had been viewed and by how many people. Here’s a screenshot of what I discovered;

Now that is pretty cool. First up, 386 views by 156 different people demonstrates the reach you can have by sharing what you do. Secondly, I am blown away by the fact that I can pull up details of the location of where those people are who have been viewing the slides. I’d be interested to know who the person is from Newport Beach is California who spent 15 mins with them today!

I used this data today at my school to sway our Tech committee around to the idea of getting a school site subscription to SlideRocket. They are offering schools with under 1000 students a site licence for $449.00 US Dollars. My argument was that we need to be exposing our kids to the kinds of tools they may find when they hit the world of work. They certainly need to understand that the social nature of tools like SlideRocket add to your  understanding of  networking and how this kind of sharing can have positive side effects. The message was well received and I am hopeful that we may see our school population exploring this tool next year.

Fingers crossed!