As this term, I am responsible for two classes of time series analysis. I would like to propose a efficient way of communication with students so they do not get bored with the numbers and notations. After taking a brief look at the Rstudio webpage about the presentation styles, I found myself enjoying reveal.js. It is elegant, flexible with many support options.

As usual, we need to install the package to start

install.packages("revealjs")

reveal.js

reveal.js is a HTML Presentation Framework based on HTML5 and CSS3. The project starts from 2011. Among competitors, reveal.js has attractive default styles. It could also help speaker with server side notes and stop watch timers which is better than beamer (:D). Check this youtube video to see how it works. You could have a GUI website to design your reveal.js pages at slides.com. So, no markdown requirement. However, I need to take advantage of Rmarkdown in this case.

First of all, I start to write the contents in my rmarkdown file. After that, I just change the header of rmarkdown file as

---
title: "Lab note 3"
author: "Hoang Nguyen"
date: "Feb 17, 2017"
output: 
    revealjs::revealjs_presentation:
        theme: sky
        highlight: pygments
        center: true
        transition: concave
        self_contained: false
        reveal_plugins: ["notes", "search","zoom","chalkboard"]
---

then you could enjoy the slides. Remember some shortcut keys:

• f: full screen
• o: overview
• s: server note sides. (For this, you need to refer to notes)

Plug-in

The reveal plugins are just awesome. They are the main reasons that I use for my slides.

• notes: Speaker notes on server sides
• zoom: Zoom at anywhere with clicks.
• search: Search text anywhere.
• chalkboard: Hand writing notes!!

I highly recommend that you should try all of them in your presentation slides.

Conclusion

reveal.js helps you quickly design the presentations from markdown documents. Not only that, you could describe different concepts efficiently using zoom and chalkboard plugin. If you need to customize your own styles, little css knowlegde would be useful. Simple change could be made with html tag. And lastly, leave some comments and take a look at my examples.