5.1 PowerPoint

PowerPoint is software that comes with Microsoft Office used mainly to support oral presentations. 

In my profession, especially linked to government departments, presentations are for adult audiences and the key is to use company colours and headers and to use very professional looking slides with bullet points.  The slides are used for top management to present and usually designed by someone else.   We don’t tend to use any of the transitions or animations because either the presenter won’t be technically able to advance to the next slide or timed animations or slide transitions will be distracting because the speaker can't/won't work with them.

In secondary education, I am finding that there is a whole new world of use of PowerPoint by students to make lessons engaging and to allow students to made a choice over the order of presentation.

PowerPoint can be used in the traditional way of presenting learning by the educator and can be used in a non-linear way with interactive buttons.  Interactive games can also be built with PowerPoint.  My son, who is in year 7, loves interactive power point games used at school.  However, he comments to us a lot about thinking about how the PowerPoint is programmed and whether the choices are fixed for each question and only the content is changed next week.    It seems to me that something like Kahoot, https://getkahoot.com/how-it-works might be easier than coding my own game in PowerPoint, but maybe I am jumping the gun here?  I noticed that Kahoot needs the students to have their own devices, which is the case for my son who is at a Catholic School.  However, at state schools, the students don’t have their own devices, so unless there is a set of iPads in the classroom, a Kahoot will be difficult to use.  

PowerPoint can be made interactive through the use of smart mice to allow students to make and input into the presentation call Mouse Mischief by Microsoft.  The PowerPoint slides need to be prepared beforehand with the questions and the icons or words that are enabled with a macro.  Also, an additional download is required to run Mouse Mischief on PowerPoint, which may be a challenge on Education Queensland computers. Also, there may be version compatibility problems.   

My son created a PowerPoint quiz for Math rules this year in year 7 and they swapped quizzes with a peer and completed the quiz.  I didn’t see this happen in class, but I do know that my son then upgraded his quiz based on his experience of taking a PowerPoint quiz designed by someone else, so it was a really interesting and useful exercise for him.  This example is an instance of creating higher order thinking according to Bloom's taxonomy.  

PowerPoint can also be used by students to create virtual museum presentations and even to make movies and videos using slides and a voice-over dialog.

PowerPoint is not available to share unless the user uploads the presentation to a sharing site such as slide share or a web site.  I have used slideshare in the past and was surprised to find slideshare has been incorporated into LinkedIn.  Students would need a LinkedIn to use slideshare now, which won't work for class.  My virtual PowerPoint demonstration is more than 10MB in size and so too large to upload as a document into my Weebly without upgrading Weebly to Pro.  If students are doing work on a USB drive in PowerPoint, students must have access to a 1TB sized USB otherwise, the file sizes will cause problems. 

I played with the settings for SlideShare and found that I needed to make my slide public to allow the embed code to work.  I have prevented download of the slides.  

Virtual powerpoint from Judith Symonds

To create this prototype, I used Dr Keeler's tutorial on virtual museum rooms. I used a tutorial on creating menus in PowerPoint to enable the menu buttons.  I found that the menu buttons are easier to create by just making the object a hyperlink to the next page.  However, I have a hyperlink set for the wool picture in the second room which leads to an pretend information page and that doesn't work in the embedded version.  I used images from Photos for Class.  However the copyright information is too small in the picture windows for the user to be able to view - so that needs adjustment.  Here is the PowerPoint in SlideShare attached to my Linked In account.

SAMR for using PowerPoint learner-accessed vs learner generated

Context	Substitution	Augmentation	Modification	Redefinition
Learner-accessed	Use PowerPoint to support an oral lesson instead of using a chalk & talk whiteboard presentation.	Use PowerPoint movie with embedded audio recording of the lesson provided on a class group wiki for students to revisit.	Use PowerPoint to create a non-linear presentation and allow the class to choose the order of the presentation.	Use PowerPoint to create an interactive lesson with magic mouse allowing students to move individual icons on the screen to answer questions such as completing phrases.
Learner- generated	Students use PowerPoint to create an assignment with information in much the same way that they would create a poster.	Students use PowerPoint to create a virtual Museum section using non-linear navigation and interactive buttons and the virtual room adding photos and content.	Students use PowerPoint to create a five question quiz on a topic with answers and buttons.  The students then swap with a peer and complete the quiz.  They then add improvements to their own quiz based on their experience of taking a quiz designed by a peer.	Students use PowerPoint to create a virtual locked problem solving room in groups and they swap virtual rooms with other groups.  Instead of finding the key to unlock the door in the last step, they could find a code.

(SAMR template table adapted from Technology Is Learning)