A Quick Guide to Adding Multimedia to PowerPoint Presentations

There are several possibilities for adding narration and other forms of multimedia to PowerPoint presentations.

To begin, the right hardware is needed: A microphone for capturing voice and a webcam for video. Most laptop computers have these features built-in, but some desktops may be lacking this hardware. Webcams that include microphones are inexpensive (about $30) if your computer does not have microphone or video capture capabilities.  

The most basic software option would be to use the presentation recording options in PowerPoint. These can be accessed using the “record slide show” option of the “slide show” tab. When a recording is started, PowerPoint will capture narration plus slide transitions, pen annotations (control-p), and laser pointer effects (control-left mouse button). The resulting multimedia presentation can be saved as a PowerPoint file. Another option is to export the narrated PowerPoint file to video (file > export > video) for sharing.

For more information:

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/record-a-slide-show-with-narration-and-slide-timings-0b9502c6-5f6c-40ae-b1e7-e47d8741161c

https://www.uwec.edu/kb/article/how-to-add-audio-to-powerpoint-on-windows-10-and-mac/

The recording and editing features of PowerPoint are limited. Techsmith’s Camtasia offers more powerful options for combining presentations with webcam video and audio. Similarly, OBS Studio is a free, open-source application for capturing and editing multimedia.

https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html

https://obsproject.com/

Adding audio and video to a presentation has a “wow!” factor, but there are some important downsides to consider. Multimedia requires a lot of data, resulting in large files. People with slow or unreliable internet connections could have difficulty accessing these files. If the presentation is shared as a PowerPoint file, the viewer will also need to have PowerPoint software to open the file. This can be problematic because not everyone has this software due to the expense. Finally, the creation of files with audio and video can be technically demanding and labor intensive for the presenter.

Files for sharing this blog post:

QuickGuideToAddingMultimediaToPowerPoint.pdf

QuickGuideToAddingMultimediaToPowerPoint.docx

Created: March 20, 2020

License: Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0

Gary Fisk, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Georgia Southwestern State University

Author of Slides for Students, a book about teaching with PowerPoint

How to Rapidly Transform Standard PowerPoint Slides to an Online Teaching Format

When moving traditional class content online, it might seem reasonable to simply upload existing PowerPoint presentations to a learning management system and call it a day! However, most PowerPoint presentations are designed to supplement a spoken presentation. The PowerPoint content of most presentations – bullet points of key terms – may not be enough for novice learners.

One way to overcome this problem is to use the “notes” feature to write short descriptions of the essential ideas from each PowerPoint slide. The aim is to add important information that would ordinarily be spoken. The slides plus notes can then be shared with students by printing the file to a .pdf format (portable document format) for sharing on a learning management system.

Author view:

Print to pdf:

Creating a pdf file for sharing with students is recommended because pdf files are easier to view than PowerPoint files. The hyperlinks to relevant information are preserved in the pdf file.

There are other possibilities for adding the spoken component to a file that can be shared. The command “record slide show” from the “slide show” tab can capture voice with the slides, which can then be saved and shared. Software applications like Camtasia can add additional multimedia features, such as video. The downsides are that this approach is time-consuming and requires more technical expertise. It can also be problematic for students that don't have access to optimum technology.

Good luck with your efforts to move course content online!

I thank Ellen Cotter and Steve Haase for their helpful feedback on this idea.

Please feel free to save or share the following files that describe this approach.

• RapidPowerPointOnlineHandout.pdf: A pdf handout of this blog post
• RapidPowerPointOnline.docx: This blog post in Word
• RapidPowerPointOnline.pptx: The PowerPoint file for the screens shots
• RapidPowerPointOnlineExampleFile.pdf: An example printed from the PowerPoint file

Created: March 15, 2020

License: Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0

Gary Fisk, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Georgia Southwestern State University

Author of Slides for Students, a book about teaching with PowerPoint

How to remember protoanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia

Dichromatism is a form of color blindness in which one of the three cone receptor subtypes is missing or abnormal. There are three possible forms, which are protoanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia.

It has been difficult for me to remember which name represents which form of dichromatism even though I have taught this topic for a long time. The names really didn't make much sense.

Today, this mental block was resolved. Here's a way to remember these forms and their underlying issues.

• Protoanopia: Proto means one or first, a synonym for primitive. These individuals are missing the long wavelengths, the L or "red" cones.
• Deuteranopia: Deuter referring to second, like the word deuce. This refers to the medium wavelengths, the M or "green" cones.
• Triatanopia: The Tri prefix means third. This represents the short wavelengths, S or "blue". 

This scheme is ordered 1, 2, and 3 for the long, medium, and short wavelengths, respectively. Problem solved!

Summary of "No Implicit-Explicit Racial Attitude Correlation in a White Sample from the rural South of the United States"

Steve Haase and I recently published "No Implicit-Explicit Racial AttitudeCorrelation in a White Sample fromthe rural South of the United States" in the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. Here's a quick take on the paper.

A consistent finding since the introduction of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is that it correlates only weakly with explicit attitudes. The reason for the lack of a relationship is unclear. An early interpretation was that the near zero relationship is a sign of unconscious processing. There are other possibilities though, perhaps technical in nature.

We hypothesized that a larger implicit-explicit correlation could be found if the explicit attitudes were more extreme. A sample of white participants was collected from the rural South of the United States, a region with a history of black prejudice. They were tested on the Modern Racism Scale (MRS; explicit attitude) and a race IAT. The MRS scores were higher than a comparable sample from Pennsylvania, but this did not lead to a strong MRS-IAT correlation. The lack of an implicit-explicit relationship does not seem to be attributable to a restriction of range effect.

We thank Stephen Reysen (the editor) and the reviewers for being open to publishing research that does not reach the traditional criterion for statistical significance.