Office Mix is a free plugin for Microsoft PowerPoint that offers a simple way to turn your PowerPoint slides into interactive online sessions and presentations. This is a great solution for anyone who wants to produce “screencasts” or “lecture casts” to adopt the “flipped classroom” concept, enabling students to watch lessons in their own time or review lecture materials afterwards.
It adds functionality to PowerPoint that allows you to record audio or video of yourself presenting, and annotate your slides with your pen as you speak. You can capture your screen to record anything on your computer, such as an application that you wish to use to demonstrate a concept. It even allows you to insert quizzes, polls, online videos and interactive apps; take content from online providers such as Khan Academy and insert these directly into your interactive lesson.
The beauty of Office Mix is that it sits inside the PowerPoint environment which is already familiar to most people – there’s no need to learn a brand new technology, software or skills. Simply take an existing PowerPoint presentation and within minutes you can convert it into a more interactive, engaging experience which can then be exported and viewed on almost any device.
Microsoft promotes the use of their “cloud” service to share mixes, but it’s actually possible to save a PowerPoint presentation as normal and still include the interactive elements you’ve embedded. So audio, video, screen annotations and quizzes will all be available to your students when they playback the presentation.
There is also an option to export your session to a video (at various export qualities for different devices) although it is worth noting that this will not contain any quizzes you’ve embedded.
The example below shows a presentation about Ohm’s Law which has been enhanced using Office Mix.
https://mix.office.com/embed/2dhwh9vlfmfx
The Office Mix plugin is available now as a free download for both Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016.
You may need to contact ITaCS to have this installed on your machine on campus if you do not have administrator privileges.
For more information, see the following video tutorials from Microsoft:
There are also several other video tutorials from Microsoft available here.