Well, if it’s good enough for Bill Gates, it’s good enough for me. If you watch the four and a half minute video of Bill Gates demonstrating the Touch Wall technology you will have a good idea of where pptPlex can take you. Mind you, I wouldn’t be turning my back on the students like that, but I have found the mouse and keyboard have excellent zoom capabilities and it frees you up immensely if you use them. I guess a laser pointer would work too but I don’t know for sure. In my opinion it is a perfect tool for teaching because you can zoom in on particular areas of your presentation. You can zoom out again so that you keep your students in the picture all the time. I installed it free from the Microsoft Labs site and the little videos on this site are helpful in explaining some things to get you going. pptPlex installs in the ribbon at the top of PowerPoint 2007. They are making a version for Office 2010 and that pleases me enormously because they said the project had finished. Can’t think why because the capacity to develop and utilise pptPlex in education is unlimited, really. PowerPoint and KeyNote can be good teaching tools but you have to get good at slide presentations. It doesn’t mean complicated but it does mean you have to be able to change the look and process. Although, a text book has always been a text book. Slide shows, in many ways, could be the e-learning text book. You can make them as simple or as sophisticated as you like as SlideShare.net demonstrates so well.
Filed under: classroom, e-learning, software, technology | Tagged: Bill Gates, e-learning, Keynote, methodology, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office for Mac, PowerPoint, pptPlex, technology, Touch Wall | 18 Comments »