Office Mix and Binary Numbers

One of the things I worked on this year was sharing resources with students. I uploaded all my PowerPoint presentations to our learning management system for example. And I created some video demos which I loaded on YouTube and linked from our LMS as well. I did see students using the PowerPoint decks for review which I think helped some of them. What I was really wanting though was something better. Something more interactive. I may have found it.

I’m in the customer preview for something called Office Mix which works with PowerPoint to let you record presentations, add video, and quizzes and other things. Basically it lets you do a lot with PowerPoint and mixed media. One of the things I wanted to do was to record presentations, which I could do with various tools already, but add more. Specifically I have long thought that it would be great if students who were watching the videos on their own could check their knowledge. Office Mix lets you add various types of quiz questions to a presentation so that viewers can do just that.

My learning project was an introduction to binary numbers. It includes me speaking to a (pretty good if I say so myself) set of PowerPoint slides with some quiz questions after two sections. Just something to give students a chance to try things themselves.

I’m looking at a bunch of my presentations to see if I can do more of this over the summer. The idea that kids can replay my talk and not just review the slides seems like a real positive. The only downside is that it requires PowerPoint 2013 and right now I just have a 180 trial version. May have to see what the school’s budget is for upgrading me is like.