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

Figure 10.1. Tem plate for An imal Pro ject
174 Tem plates

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Although this is not a com plex pro ject, it might be a good one for second
graders, for example, who are first be ing in troduced to PowerPoint. This pro ject
does not re quire VBA or hyperlinks or an imations or any thing but the most ba sic
features of PowerPoint. For a class of students who are new to PowerPoint, by
getting them started you can save them hours of computer work and allow them
to con centrate on the content.
As projects be come more complex, tem plates become more powerful. You
might want to introduce your stu 
dents slowly to ad 
vanced features of
PowerPoint, or you might not want to in troduce them to some features at all. But
you might want them to take full ad vantage of these features right away.
In Chapter 8 we saw ex amples of pro jects that easily can be turned into tem-
plates. You might want your students to write quizzes with all the features of
VBA that we discussed, but you might not want them to have to deal with VBA.
Using the examples from Chap ter 8, you can set up a template with no questions
or a fake question and give your students in structions about how to add slides
and tie the but tons to the ap propriate pro cedures. For the mul tiple-choice ex am-
ples, they don’t need to change the VBA code at all.
As an other tem plate example, chapter 7 of Agnew, Kellerman, and Meyer
(1996) discusses a cur rent events pro ject. In this pro ject, each student or group
of stu dents creates a single slide about a current event. The slide contains a brief
paragraph about the event and a but ton for the ci tation and pho tograph of the
event. This project could be done as a tem plate in which the teacher creates all
the parts of the pro ject and the stu dents simply add the pic tures, ci tations, and
news sum maries. In the end, all the slides are put to gether to form a class
collection of current events.
Many top ics would work well in a template for mat. Pro jects that work es-
pecially well are ones in which you would like the stu dents to in clude a fixed
body of in formation, and each stu dent or group in cludes the same kind of infor-
mation about a dif ferent topic. For ex ample, school clubs, U.S. presidents, coun -
tries in Eu rope, Spanish verbs, and state flags are all top ics that lend themselves
well to templates.