For the third and final part of my Zoho Docs series, I'll be covering Zoho Show. Zoho Show is the presentation part of the Zoho Docs suite. Zoho show is remarkably feature-full for being a cloud-based PowerPoint alternative, and in this tutorial, you'll learn everything you need to make great presentations for free with Zoho.

Making a Zoho Presentation

To create a presentation in Zoho Show, look towards the upper left-hand corner of the Zoho Docs home screen and click on the Create button. From the drop-down menu, click Presentation.

Choosing your presentation's theme.

You'll now be brought to a page where you can choose your presentation's name, aspect ratio, and theme. Give your presentation a name next to the appropriately named name title. Directly underneath this title is the aspect ratio selector. You can choose from wide (16:9) or normal (4:3).

After choosing your aspect ratio, it's time to choose your theme. You can do this by looking towards the center of the window and scrolling through all of the available themes for your aspect ratio.

Once you've chosen a theme, look towards the right-hand side of the window where you'll see two menus: colors and font. Choose what color and font set you'd like to use in your document from their respective menus.

Once you're ready to create your document, look towards the bottom of the theme selection menu and click on the OK button. You'll now be brought to your new presentation.

Like in most popular presentation applications, you can start editing your new presentation by clicking into the title on the title slide or by clicking into a textbox on a standard slide.

Adding new slides to your presentation is simple as well: just look towards the top of your slide list (left-hand side of the window) and click the new slide button. Additionally, to the right of this button, is a settings button that can be used to delete, duplicate, lock, and hide slides.

To further customize your presentation, look to the top of your Zoho Show window and make sure you're clicked into the Home tab.

Three kinds of presentations:

1. PowerPoint is a complete presentation graphics package. It gives you everything you need to produce a professional-looking presentation. PowerPoint offers word processing, outlining, drawing, graphing, and presentation management tools- all designed to be easy to use and learn. When you create a presentation using PowerPoint, the presentation is made up of a series of slides. The slides that you create using PowerPoint can also be presented as overhead transparencies or 35mm slides. In addition to slides, you can print audience handouts, outlines, and speaker's notes. You can format all the slides in a presentation using the powerful Slide Master which will be covered in the tutorial.

You can keep your entire presentation in a single file- all your slides, speaker's notes, and audience handouts.

You can import what you have created in other Microsoft products, such as Word and Excel into any of your slides.

2. Zoho Projects is an online project management solution, with a perfect mix of collaboration and management functions. Zoho Projects goes way beyond standard project management solutions - utilize the power of social software to manage your projects online. Aside from web based project planning and reporting capabilities, ZohoProjects brings everyone in your project team together and helps them get the project done Online.

3. Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for exploring and sharing ideas upon a virtual canvas. While PowerPoint has long been held as the standard for educational slideshow presentations, Prezi is distinguished by its Zooming User Interface, which enables users to zoom in and out of their presentation media. It is a free online program, and student users who register with their university email account benefit from added storage space. Youtube videos can be embedded into the presentation, and information can be presented in a fluid, original way that allows for a big picture perspective of all presented information so that the student can zoom out and remind their audience of all that has been covered.

In my opinion, each of these kinds of presentations are easy to use. And also, it gives us an opportunity, using new technologies, to express our thoughts more brightly and clearly.

As for storytelling, I would like to note that this is the oldest form of education. Cultures around the world have always told tales as a way of passing down their beliefs, traditions, and history to future generations. Stories capture the imagination, engaging the emotions and opening the minds of listeners. Consequently, any point that is made in a story or any teaching that is done afterward is likely to be much more effective.

Storytellers, like stage directors, must decide what the characters and setting look like, how they sound and smell, and what they are feeling. The tellers use their voices, movement, and expressions to bring these elements to life in the listeners’ minds and hearts. Storytellers are “directors of the theater of the mind,” co-creating the story’s images and emotions with the audience. That is why sharing stories builds community—between teller and audience and from one listener to the next.

And last, I would like to tell about the service padlet. Padlet is a virtual wall that allows people to express their thoughts on a common topic easily. It works like an online sheet of paper where people can put any content (e.g. images, videos, documents, text) anywhere on the page, together with anyone, from any device. Padlet is free and easy to use!