Integrating Technology in the Foreign Language Classroom 

PowerPoint yes/no Feedback

PowerPoint tends to be structured in a way that encourages linear presentation, making it all too easy to fall into the pattern of presenting slide after boring slide. But with a little effort, it is possible to use some basic elements of the program to create interactive tools that help engage the student and break things up a bit.  We will see how to create a yes/no feedback loop to allow students to answer questions and receive feedback about which answer is correct. 

The setup

How do we do this?  The simple part is creating the question slides and a set of two feedback slides, as seen above. Next we can prevent the presentation from accidentally displaying the feedback slides. PowerPoint lets us do this by hiding these slides.  Right-click on each of the two feedback slides that you want to hide and select Hide Slide.  Now you cannot just fall through to this slide. Instead a presentation will skip over them unless you jump to them specifically.

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.

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 can also insert and modify shapes and access the Shape Fill format through the Format menu. There's more than one way to skin a cat.)

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.

Download a copy of this PPT presentation here.

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

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/

Return to Syllabus