Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Making a Flipped Classroom Lecture Using PowerPoint 2010 and a Microphone

There are many suggestions when it comes to making lectures for your flipped classroom -- many people recommend expensive, complicated software to make screencasts. This can be a major obstacle for teachers that just want to dip their toes into the flipped classroom waters to see how their students respond.

In this post, you will learn how to take a presentation in PowerPoint and convert it into a video without any extra special software.

One major benefit of using PowerPoint to make your video lessons is that you can use it in multiple formats -- in class as a regular presentation or online as a video (or as a slideshow). It is also very easy to go back and edit the PowerPoint content or your narration of a single slide, whereas regular screencasting software would make you go back and record the whole thing again or use complicated video-editing software to splice together multiple takes.

1. Make your PowerPoint presentation.

  • You won't be able to move objects around during the presentation and recording phase, so you will need to set up animations for any movement that you want to happen.

Scroll to the end of the animations choices to get movement animations.

You can change the order that things move in the "Animations" tab.
  • You can use PowerPoint's themes to quickly make your presentation look much more professional.
2. Check your microphone and recording settings.
Right click on the little speaker and then click on "Recording devices"
Talk into your preferred microphone, click on the one that shows green bars on the right, and then choose "Set Default". Click "OK"

3. Record your PowerPoint with narration.
Make sure both of these are selected.

You can remove timings or narration from individual slides or the whole show if you want.
This is the symbol representing the narration that you recorded.

4. Save your presentation often. You don't want to loose your hard work to a computer meltdown.
5. When you are happy with your slides, narration, and timing, it is time to save as a video.
Choose File > Save As > Save as type: Windows Media Video (*.wmv)
This can take a LONG time. On my fairly powerfule computer, it took about 30 minutes.
6. Upload your video to Youtube, your school site, or other video service.

Sign into Youtube and click "Upload".
Drag your new video file into Youtube.

Choose your advanced settings if you want comments or if you want to add more data about your video.

Give your video a title and description. Tags are categories that will help people find your video.
7. Share the link with your students and colleagues.