Fwd: Free Add In for Office
John Hegarty
Office Mix http://mix.office.com/
Office Mix helps PowerPoint users turn their slides into interactive online presentations with video, audio, ink, quizzes, and polls.
Get ready for a whole new way to communicate with PowerPoint.
|
|
“Office Mix
is about new ways of communication,” said Anoop Gupta, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research.Office Mix, a free add-in for PowerPoint 2013 that was released today as a customer preview, helps users turn their slide decks into interactive presentations that can be accessed on nearly any device. It offers an easy way to add audio, video, handwriting, quizzes, and polls to PowerPoint slides. These "mixes" can then be shared through an online portal, where the author can get detailed analytics about who watched what.
Keep that last point in mind the next time your manager sends you a deck. While the initial focus for Office Mix is teachers, the team behind it sees broad potential for the workplace.
"Office Mix is about new ways of communication," said Anoop Gupta, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research (MSR). "We're all trying to get our messages across, and this becomes a powerful tool for people to do that."
Office Mix began as a prototype project by MSR to create interactive lessons for teachers. Technology is already transforming the classroom, but the pace will only accelerate, Gupta said.
"People talk about the digital transformation, but today we're still in an industrial age of education: Everyone learns in lockstep like they're on an assembly line," he said. "The future is much more personalized."
Office Mix is one step in that direction. Teachers can use it to track student progress online through analytics, seeing how they did on quizzes and providing individual attention as needed. They could also use a mix to get absent students up to speed. And
Office Mix can help with a growing trend called blended learning, where lectures are watched at home and class time is devoted to homework and discussion.
In 2012, Gupta started work on what became Office Mix. He knew teachers wanted to bring online lessons into the classroom, but many saw it as expensive and difficult. He decided to make it easy through a tool that teachers (and a billion others) already used:
PowerPoint.
The concept then landed with the Startup Business Group (SBG), a team that sits between MSR and Microsoft's product teams. They identify new business opportunities, build new products, and take them to market.
A small team in SBG partnered with the PowerPoint team to prototype the idea and bring it to life, said Shanen Boettcher, general manager of the Startup Business Group. PowerPoint was the perfect home for Gupta's tool because so much content is created there
and so many teachers are already familiar with it, he said.
Users who download the Office Mix add-in will see a "MIX" tab appear in the PowerPoint ribbon. It adds new functionality to PowerPoint, such as the ability to record audio and video of yourself narrating your slides, including what you write or draw on the
screen. Teachers can also easily embed quizzes, polls, web pages, and interactive apps. Among the apps that are already included in Office Mix are exercises and lessons from the enormously popular
Khan Academy and
CK-12 Foundation.
|
|
Office
Mix helps teachers create and record a fully interactive lesson without having to tackle an unfamiliar or tech-heavy user interface.Once a user clicks "Upload," the presentation is loaded to the Office Mix website. It's private until a user wants to share it, which is as easy as posting a link or sending an email. Near-instant analytics are also available at the Office Mix website, where teachers can see if students have watched the lesson and how they did on any quizzes.
|
Orlagh O’Donnell |
||
|
Education Manager Microsoft Ireland Microsoft in Education We are partners in learning. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
About Microsoft Ireland: www.microsoft.com/ireland
Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited. A company incorporated and registered in Ireland number 256796.
Microsoft Ireland Research. A company incorporated and registered in Ireland number 342235.
Registered office 70 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2, Ireland
