Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

De sign ing As sign ments for Your Stu dents
As pow erful as it is to cre ate mul timedia pro jects for your stu dents, it is
more pow erful to have them create their own multimedia pro jects. While the
project you create can increase mo tivation and tap into different learning styles,
having stu dents create their own pro jects is an out standing ve hicle for creating a
stu dent-cen tered and constructivist learn ing en vi ron ment, for tak ing a
multidisciplinary ap proach to ed ucation, and for helping students understand
information and media.
Projects you assign can be simple or complex, involving a few dif ferent
types of media or several, us ing a simple design structure that you assign or a
complex structure and metaphor that your stu dents choose. As you continue
through this book, you will learn ad vanced techniques for making PowerPoint do
what you want it to do. You might share these techniques with your stu dents, or
you might let them cre ate less com plex projects. Another al ternative is to cre ate
templates for your stu dents in which you create the basic structure of the pro ject,
using simple or advanced PowerPoint techniques, and have your students fill in
the template with con tent and me dia. Templates are discussed in Chapter 10.
Student pro jects need to follow a similar design pro cess to any other multi-
media pro jects. However, as a teacher, you must de cide (1) how much you want
to pro vide for your stu dents and (2) how much help you want to give your stu -
dents at each step.
First, you must create an assignment in a way that stu dents can un derstand.
Agnew, Kellerman, and Meyer (1996, pp. 120–121) out line four keys to help
stu dents cre ate a well-or ga nized mul ti me dia project:
1. “[A]rticulate a well-thought-out assignment.”
2. “[D]emonstrate excellent examples of projects that others have cre -
ated.”
3. “[E]ncourage 
stu 
dents to un leash their creativity by find ing new meta-
phors for in for ma tion.”
4. 
Help “stu dents ex e cute an ef fec tive pro cess.”
As an ed u ca tor, you prob a bly are com fort able cre at ing as sign ments for
your stu dents. How ever, mul timedia pro jects can be larger and more complex
than or dinary assignments. Being clear abut your pur pose and ex pectations can
8 Mul ti me dia De sign

---

help students un derstand what they are supposed to do and help them meet and
exceed your ex pectations. Be sure to match the pro ject you assign to your cur ric-
ular goals and the technical skills of your students. If you plan to have stu dents
create sev eral multimedia projects, you can make the first project sim ple to help
them un derstand the technology. As their technology skills grow, the projects
can be more complex.
Many students need concrete examples. The more multimedia you do (for
yourself or your students), the more ex amples you will have to show students.
You also want to en courage creative think ing, in cluding brainstorming
ideas for metaphors. A metaphor helps a user nav igate through a project by giv -
ing the user something from the real world to relate to what the controls (such as
buttons and hy pertext links) do. Met aphors can be closely re lated to the project
or can be an un related nav igation and visualization tools. You can pro vide your
students with a metaphor (this might be ap propriate for early pro jects), you can
brainstorm dif ferent metaphors for dif ferent pro jects as a class, you can brain-
storm with groups about metaphors for a specific pro ject, or you can have groups 
brainstorm on their own.
Finally, you will want to help your stu dents with the de sign pro cess. Stu -
dents might need help with all the de sign steps. You can give your students help
with all of the fol lowing:
•