I gave a couple of python workshops at the ACINN recently. It gave me a good excuse not to do what I should do right now, and try two fancy new tools instead: Reveal.js and RISE.
Reveal.js
Reveal.js is an open-source tool to create HTML presentations which will be displayed in an internet browser. This has a strong advantage: it is platform independent, and displayable on basically any computer (as opposed to Microsoft Office, which requires an expensive license). But this alone is maybe not enough to make the tool so useful: after all, Latex provides similar advantages thanks to its pdf output (arguably a little bit less fancy though).
RISE
RISE is an open-source tool to convert jupyter notebooks into reveal.js presentations. Each notebook cell is formatted as a slide, including title, pictures, bullet lists, and more. In particular, code snippets and their output are displayed in a nice, illustrative way.
Since an example is better than a thousand words, here you go: http://fabienmaussion.info/acinn_xarray_workshop
You can use the arrows in the lower right corner as well as your keyboard to
navigate between slides.
With escape, you can trigger an overview of the presentation, illustrating
it’s structure into “main slides” and “sub-slides”.
Details
Both tools are quite easy to use after a short familiarization phase. There is no need to install Reveal.js if you install RISE via conda as suggested by their documentation. After installation, a new button (“Enter/Exit Live Reveal Slideshow”) is available in the notebook toolbar. It is now possible to start presentations from an active notebook, and even to run code from within the presentation! Click here to have a look at the notebook I wrote to generate the presentation above. I used the default layout, but there are many ways to personalize your presentation if you feel like it.
To share your presentation, you can convert your notebook into HTML slides with the command:
$ jupyter-nbconvert --to slides my-presentation-notebook.ipynb
To look at these you’ll need a local reveal.js install (see e.g. here for instructions).
Finally, you can publish your HTML presentations online, too! Either by using available online platforms, or on your own website like I did. If you use github pages, this can be done quite easily with a few git commands.