If you’re into creating online lessons or presentations, you’ll know that its no easy task. You’ll need a number of tools to put your lessons together many of which don’t come cheap. What’s more, you’ll need to have strong technical knowledge of the tools in order to put together a compelling online presentation. Microsoft Office Mix is a powerful medium that lets you build your online presentations more easily using your favorite tool: PowerPoint. In this article, we take a look at Office Mix and how it can transform the way you create lessons using PowerPoint.
Creating Interactive Online Lessons Using Office Mix
Office Mix lets you turn your PowerPoint presentations into interactive online lessons meaning you can add audio and video files of yourself delivering the presentation, annotate on slides as you deliver your talk, insert quizzes and practice exercises all just using the Office Mix add-in on PowerPoint. In fact, you can even do a screencast on your PC and upload and share them with whoever you like.
Microsoft likes to call these lessons mixes. Mixes can be viewed on any device that supports an internet connection. To get started with office Mix, you’ll first need to have a couple of things. Office 2013 or an Office 365 account (with download rights for the latest Office) that is running on Windows 7, 8, or 8.1.
To start using Office Mix, you’ll need to head over to mix.office.com and sign up for an account using your Microsoft credentials, an organizational account, or with Facebook or Google sign ins.
Download the Office Mix plugin and run the EXE file. You’ll need to wait a bit until the installation is complete because the tool will have to download and set up the Office extension tools and framework. After the installation is done, you will find a new tab in your PowerPoint 2013 presentation called Mix.
To create a mix, you will need to create the usual slides in your presentation and then include the interactive elements using the add-in. You will need to download each feature separately from the Office Store to use them, but apart from that using the features are relatively easy.
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The quizzes have standard formats such as true or false, multiple choice, multiple response, free response, and polls and you have options to set the number of attempts, provide hints, add timers, and even provide feedback on the answers selected by the students, who take up your online course. You even have apps from popular organizations such as Khan Academy and CK-12 Foundation to make use of.
There are also tools to screencast your demonstrations, record a voiceover, and add annotations and edit your recordings. When you have completed your lesson, you can click the Upload button to move the mix to the Office Mix website. From there, you will be able to easily share it to anyone or post the link to your LMS (Learning Management System).
Office Mix provides a sensible and effective way for anyone who needs to create instructional content. It not only simplifies the creation of content, but also provides an invaluable evaluation system for instructors to view feedback on the efforts and study patterns of students.
The cloud based delivery mechanism and the fact that students can access the lessons from just about any device with a modern browser and an internet connection makes it a wholesome package for all. With a very easy learning curve, you could be designing much more interactive and engaging content painlessly in an inexpensive manner. If you are looking for a sensible and convenient way to create instructional materials check out Office Mix.
Here is a nice little video preview of how Office Mix works.
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