Interactive PowerPoint Lessons

[Dianne Aldridge]

I'm a graduate student designing a series of interactive PP lessons
for a 3rd grade curriculum on inventions as part of an action research
project. I've got 5 categories of inventions with approx. 6 individual
inventions contained within the category. Quizzes will also be a part
of the lesson. I have calculated that each lesson will run between 1 &
2 MB; animated .gifs are being used and there will be links to
Internet resources. The lessons will be delivered in a 20-unit
computer lab. My questions:

1. What is the best method to deliver these lessons - via hard drive,
network server, or CD?

2. I plan on creating each lesson in a separate file and linking them
together - is this the most efficient way to deal with such a large
number of files? I'm concerned that as students choose multiple
lessons, too many files may be opened at once and backtracking to
previous lessons may be a problem.

I appreciate any advice.
Thanks --

 

[Guest]

Dianne,

Sounds like a really interesting project. PowerPoint presentations,
particularly large ones tend to run best from the hard drive, so if you are
controlling the environment where they are running, putting them on the hard
drives would probably be best. However, putting them on CD shouldn't be too
bad, and would be needed if you want to distribute them more widely. Another
consideration is if your quizzes are writing data somewhere. They can't
write to the CD.

As far as how to link the lessons, you could have a menu presentation that
links to the other lessons. Each lesson could end with a button that is set
to End Show. That could bring them back to the menu so you won't build up a
lot of open lessons.

Good luck. Let us know how this is going.

--David

David M. Marcovitz
Author of _Powerful PowerPoint for Educators_
http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/

 

[Guest]

Hi Dianne,

See Taj's tutorials:
http://www.awesomebackgrounds.com/powerpointtutorials.htm

Especially the one on interactive menus.

I recommend a CD.

Glenna

 

[Dianne Aldridge]

Mr. Marcovitz -
Thank you so much for such a prompt reply! A follow-up question, if
you don't mind:
The teachers are requesting that the quizzes allow for the students to
be able reference original lesson material to find the correct answers
(to adhere to a research content standard). I'm having trouble
figuring out how to design the PP flow; from the quiz I can easily
link back to the lesson PP, but how do I get back to the quiz, and
specifically, the exact question the student was at before they
linked? I'm also concerned about "busying" up the lesson PP with
buttons that will confuse the student as they are going through the
lesson for the first time, pre-quiz.

This Google group is a God-send - thanks for sharing your expertise!

 

[Guest]

Dianne,

Although it might not seem like it, getting PowerPoint to do what you want
is the easy part. Designing how you want it to look is the hard part. Spend
a lot of time with the design, and then work on getting PowerPoint to do what
you want. Your graduate professors probably have already recommended (and
you might have already read) some good books on design, but I like a book by
Ivers and Barron, called Multimedia Projects in Education. I require it in
my graduate multimedia design class.

I am imagining that each module will be one presentation. This includes any
tutorial and quiz material. This will make it easier for the quiz to
interact with the tutorial. With a small amount of scripting in VBA, you can
have buttons that are hidden. For example, I picture a quiz question that,
if you get the wrong answer, a button pops up that says, click here to review
this material. A click returns to the portion of the tutorial and
simultaneously shows a button on the tutorial that says Return to Quiz. This
leaves the tutorial uncluttered the first time through.

I don't think I have an example that does exactly what I describe on my web
site, but Examples 6.6 and 6.8 show simple examples that hide and show
objects. Go to my Web site:

http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/

and click on Examples by Chapter and then click on Chapter 6 to see these
examples.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

--David

David M. Marcovitz
Author of _Powerful PowerPoint for Educators_
http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/
:

 

[Guest]

Hi,

I like the idea of the pop-up box, but you don't have to use VB for it. You
can use triggers and get the same effect without VB (which doesn't work on
the MAC side of the house). See Kathy's tutorial on triggers:
http://www.powerpointanswers.com/article1056.html

Glenna

 

[Guest]

First, I want to correct a misconception. The VB stuff DOES work on the Mac
side of things. It's Acitve X stuff that doesn't work on the Mac. All the
examples on my site work on both Mac and Windows.

I think triggers will do a lot of things (but they only work in PowerPoint
2002 and above), but there are limits. I don't use them a lot so I don't
know the answers to these questions. Can a trigger activate something from
another slide? Can a single click activate an animation (via trigger) and
link to another slide? At some point, the button in the tutorial has to
appear and disappear, and that is likely to happen either from another slide
and/or at the same time that the user is jumping to another slide.

Finally, if there is any sort of data collection (keeping score in the quiz,
for example) or short-answer questions, VBA will be needed.

Triggers are a great tool and Kathy's tutorial will make a lot of things
easier. Put some VBA on top of that, and you can do even more.

--David

David M. Marcovitz
Author of _Powerful PowerPoint for Educators_
http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/

 

[Guest]

My bad, Active X is the slippery devil that doesn't work on the MAC side.
But I love those nifty toolbox items, don't you?

I was just trying to offer an alternative to VB... ;-)

Triggers won't jump slides (without VB, of course). But you can set up this
scenario with triggers and action settings:

Create a pop-up text box that says "Wrong answer, click here to Review
Topic". Set the ACTION SETTINGS for the pop up text box to link to the
specific slide in the specific presentation for the review. Add an entrance
animation and an exit animation to the pop-up text box. Set the trigger for
the entrance animation to be the wrong answer object. Set the trigger for
the exit animation to be the pop-up review box.

What happens when the show is run:
Someone clicks on the wrong answer the Click to Review box pops up. They
click on the pop up box and jump to the "module" for review. When they hit
escape from the review module, they come back to the question slide and the
review pop up text box is gone.

No way to do data collection , though. Guess I'll have to break down and
buy your book.

Ms. <G>

 

[David M. Marcovitz]

No problem. Actually, the caveat that is important for more people is
that the VBA stuff doesn't work with the PowerPoint Viewer. I think your
alternative is a great idea. Maybe Dianne will write back and give us
more details about her needs so we can know if all the fancy animation
effects will be enough or if she will need VBA.
--David

--
David M. Marcovitz, Ph.D.
Director of Graduate Programs in Educational Technology
Loyola College in Maryland
Author of _Powerful PowerPoint for Educators_
http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/

 

[Dianne Aldridge]

I must say, I am very impressed with this Google group. I can't
believe that you both have been conversing about my project over the
past two days. What committed educators you must be!

I think that the 'fancy' animation effects will work for me. It would
be nice to give the teachers some kind of feedback report on whether
or not the student was able to find the correct answers by refering
back to the lesson material, but I can't even begin to think how that
might be accomplished. VBA, I would assume. I do have some experience
with Visual Basic, so I might be able to pick up on it, especially if
I have good examples to study. Which brings me to your book, Dr.
Marcovitz. I have ordered it and the Ivers & Barron book that you
recommended, so perhaps between the two I will have plenty of material
to develop my lessons.

I can't thank the both of you enough for all of your help. I'll be
getting back with you again as my efforts progress, I'm sure!

 

[Dianne Aldridge]

I thought of something after I made my previous post:

Glenna, you said that I can use a pop-up text box to allow the student
to go back and review the lesson material and that once they have,
they can hit the Esc key to return to the question and cause the
pop-up text box to disappear. Is there any way to get around having to
hit the Esc key - perhaps another pop-up box that says "Go back to
question" -- I'm concerned that 3rd grade students might have trouble
with using the Esc key. Or maybe a pop-up could appear that says, "Hit
ESC to go back to the question" as a reminder of how to continue. But
now I'm wondering if such a pop-up box can be placed in such a way
that it doesn't interfere with their reading of the lesson material.

 

[Echo S]

I must say, I am very impressed with this Google group.

I just wanted to mention that, although you're accessing this group via
Google Groups, it's actually a newsgroup hosted on the Microsoft servers.
There are a few other ways to access this content, just in case you're
interested.

http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00024.htm gives instructions for
accessing via Outlook Express or another newsreader.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx is MS's
web-based interface.

Welcome to the newsgroup!

 

[Kathy J]

Diane -
Instead of hyperlinking to the actual slide with the review materials, set
up a custom show (Slide Show --> Custom Show) that contains the slide or
slides with the review materials. When you set up the hyperlink, set it to
"Show and Return". Then, when they finish the review materials, they can
return to the question slide and try again.

What's more, if you set up the hyperlink and the exit trigger on the same
shape, the pop-up will be gone when the student returns to the question
slide.

--
Kathryn Jacobs, Microsoft MVP PowerPoint and OneNote
Author of Kathy Jacobs on PowerPoint - Available now from Holy Macro! Books
Get PowerPoint answers at http://www.powerpointanswers.com
Featured Presenter at PPT 2004 - http://www.pptlive.com
Need to learn about advanced PowerPoint Animations? Check out:
http://www.eclecticacademy.com/newclasses.htm#pptanim

I believe life is meant to be lived. But:
if we live without making a difference, it makes no difference that we lived