There are hundred of free and premium slider plugins, I just checked a free WordPress slider plugin that easily allows you to create a simple slider for displaying your featured image along with the post title and excerpt in WordPress.
So you will be needing to install and activate Genesis Slider plugin in your WordPress install. The plugin includes auto progress options and settings for the dimensions of your slideshow. Also you can choose to display your blog posts or pages, what category to pull from and even the specific post IDs of the posts you want to display. Finally, you can place the slider widget by dragging it to your sidebar or any other widget area. But remember, it only supports Genesis child themes.