| Jean LeLoup & Bob Ponterio SUNY Cortland © 2011 |
Here below we see a group of slides. The first two (slides #1 & #2) pose a question and offer possible answers. When the student clicks on an answer (either on the image or on the text), we want to jump to the slide that provides the appropriate feedback (#3 or #4): Great job! or Try again. From these feedback slides, we want to return to the correct (originating) question slide.
Of course, we never want to accidentally fall through to a feedback slide inappropriately as this would certainly confuse the student. Instead, we want to skip over those feedback slides to whatever comes next (#5).
In addition, we do not want to create separate feedback slides for each
question. It is more efficient to have a single yes/no feedback group
for the entire presentation.
How do we do this? The simple part is creating the
question slides and a set of two feedback slides, as seen above. |
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One way to prevent a mouse click from doing something we don't want is to use an Action Button covering the entire slide to intercept any mouse clicks. Once the student has seen a feedback slide, we want to jump
back to the original question slide. We can create an Action Button
that is invisible and that covers the entire slide. Use the menu to
select Insert /
Shapes / Action Buttons, then draw the button covering the entire
slide. |
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| After you create the button covering the slide, you can right-click on the button and select hyperlink to open a window allow you
to change the Action
Settings. If you hyperlink to "Last Slide Viewed", clicking
anywhere on the screen will now take to back to whichever slide was viewed
just before coming to this feedback slide, thus completing the loop. |
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Of course, the Action Button now covers up the content of the slide, so we need to make the button invisible (transparent). Right-click on the button and select Format Shape. Under Fill, change the transparency to 100% by dragging the slider. Voilà! an invisible button covering the whole slide! Do the same thing for the other feedback slide as well. You can also copy and paste a button from one slide to another. (Note that you could insert and modify shapes and access the Shape Fill format through the Format menu. There's more than one way to skin a cat.) |
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Now on any slide in your PowerPoint presentation, you can hyperlink from an image, from a button, or from any text to one of these right or wrong answer feedback slides. Clicking anywhere on the feedback slide will then take you back to the slide you came from. It doesn't really matter where you put this feedback slide group in your presentation because if you fall through to these hidden slides, your presentation will just skip over them. However, it does make sense to group in in a way that is meaningful to you so you will understand how you meant it to work when you look at the project again in 5 years! Good practice is to group all such out of sequence slides together, perhaps at the end of your PowerPoint slide show or at the end of a particular group os slides that go together, and jump over them to avoid getting to them by accident.
It can also be good practice to turn off automatic advancing of slides all together (Transitions / Advance Slide - turn off "on mouse click" then apply to all). Then you need to build in button controls for all movement through the presentation. Simply falling through to the next slide by clicking anywhere will no longer work.
Let's take our Victor Hugo Powerpoint from a previous lesson and add some additional interactive information about Hugo's Life.
We will insert three additional hidden slides with information about Hugo's life.
Early life
Victor Hugo grew up during the reign of Napoleon (until Waterloo in 1815) and later during the Restoration of the French monarchy (Louis XVIII & Charles X).
Works
Victor Hugo was a prolific writer who is well known today for his many major French novels, plays, and poems.
He was the leader of the movement of French Romanticism.
He also played an important role in French politics and had to live part of his life in exile.
Death
Hugo returned to France from exile in 1970 and was welcomed as a national hero and treasure.
His 79th birthday was celebrated with a parade lasting six hours. It passed before his home where he watched from his window.
When he dies at the age of 83, the entire country went into mourning
We can hide those three slides and hyperlink to them from Action Buttons on the Hugo's Life slide. Finally, we can use an invisible Action Button covering each of the hidden slides to return to the last slide viewed.
Take a look at the modified Powerpoint: New Victor Hugo Powerpoint
Creating an Interactive PowerPoint Lesson for the Classroom : http://www.thejournal.com/articles/14916_1
Using Invisible Buttons in a 2007 PowerPoint Slide Show : http://www.internet4classrooms.com/pp_inv_buttons_07.htm
From:
http://www.internet4classrooms.com/on-line_powerpoint.htm
If you know something about programming, you may go on to do more complex things in PowerPoint using VBA Scripts. We won't go into that in this course, but here are some useful references:
How do I use VBA code in PowerPoint? : http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00033.htm
VBA Tutorials : http://skp.mvps.org/vba.htm
Powerful PowerPoint for Educators : http://www.loyola.edu/edudept/PowerfulPowerPoint/
