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

Learn to use PowerPoint in ways you never thought possible. Marcovitz shows how, providing practical instruction for using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to create learning environments and educational materials that support and enhance student success. With the widespread availability of PowerPoint (every copy beginning with version 1997 comes with VBA built-in) schools have all the tools they need to create powerful and interactive multimedia resources. The true power of multimedia lies in its ability to engage students' minds. Professional multimedia tools are too difficult to learn, too expensive, or both, and although many teachers and students use HyperStudio or PowerPoint to develop multimedia projects, these projects often lack true interactivity. Using VBA with PowerPoint gives teachers and students an accessible way to easily create interactive multimedia resources and projects.

After introducing the basics of educational planning, the design process, and the benefits of designing and using multimedia, this book offers the practical knowledge you need to create powerful educational resources. Learn to create projects that include pictures, videos, recorded voices, and links to websites, interactive menus, and quizzes and short-answer questions with automatic user-feedback. The possibilities are endless. Anyone with basic PowerPoint skills can use this book to create powerful educational material for themselves, their colleagues, their students, or their own children.

DAVID M. MARCOVITZ is Associate Professor and Educational Technology Director, Department of Education, Loyola College, Baltimore. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Technology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he studied support for technology in elementary schools. He has taught computer applications and computer programming at the high school level, and he has worked as a technology specialist in a high school. Prior to teaching at Loyola College, he taught in the Educational Technology Program at Florida Atlantic University. He was hired by Loyola College in 1997 to develop a Masters program in Educational Technology, a program he coordinates and for which he teaches many of the classes, including Multimedia Design in the Classroom. He is the author of several articles about educational technology.