I have a confession. I don’t have much of a patience to watch a long tutorial video. In fact, videos for me are only compelling when they are telling stories, engaging me, teaching me something super relevant. In general, tutorials are informative, but I find most of them boring. However, I’ve just watched a 30-minute video showcasing Office Mix, a plug-in to Power Point. I simply couldn’t stop watching, for the features that it incorporates to Power Point are just amazing!
Office Mix allows you to create highly interactive experiences for learners with features that are really user-friendly for the creators, in this case, teachers, elearning facilitators, and the students themselves. You can add videos, annotations, a small screen with your webcam while you explain things or challenge your viewers. Interactive quizzes and screencasting are also part of the suite. It seems that Office Mix is that kind of tool that we are always pursuing, one that converges much of the things we want to create with a publishing tool.
The possibilities for it are endless:
- Creating exciting and interactive tutorials
- Demonstrating some content
- Creating interactive stories
- Building Interactive quizzes
- Producing high-quality screencasts
- Making your students produce their own videos
When you are finished, you can make it available online and embed it to any website. It is accessible from the web and any mobile device. Are you here with me, picturing a lesson in which students have access to it from their mobile devices, work on their pace and you are free to walk around and check how they are doing? I can totally see myself doing that and also producing content for my blended and online classes.
I still need to play around with the tool, but it really seems promising.
I need to figure out how to run it on my Mac. Then, it is just a matter to start authoring high-quality materials to support and enhance learning.
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