Best Bytes: SAP 2.0 PowerPoint Tools Using Twitter !
Posted on February 7, 2011 by kcarlson | No Comments
Submitted by Leslee Shell, Health Sciences Librarian, ASU at the Downtown Phoenix campus
Want to make your PowerPoint presentations more dynamic and interactive? A few weeks ago I saw a demonstration of a tool that allows audience members, students, or session participants to post messages to an interactive slide during a PowerPoint presentation. It’s SAP 2.0 PowerPoint Tools and it allows for clicker-like interactivity, but without the expense of clickers. So an instructor can pose a question and ask students in a lecture to respond on the screen.
I have tried it out. I cut-and-pasted the interactive slide from the link given above. The link includes slide templates that one can copy and paste into a PowerPoint. It really works! Of course, students need a twitter account, and there’s no guarantee what they might say on screen.
The key is instructing students to use a hashtag or keyword in every response. Then the presenter types in the same hashtag and the responses appear on the screen. Not sure what a hashtag is?
The Twitter help center defines it this way:
Hashtags: helping you find interesting Tweets
* People use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search.
* Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets in that category.
* Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet.
* Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics.
But we discovered that the # symbol wasn’t necessary. You could just type a word, but pick an uncommon word, and have students include that word in their message. I tried PubMed, but there were lots of tweets on that topic, so you need to pick a unique or unusual word for students to incorporate in their tweet.
I haven’t used it in class yet, but I’m working up my courage. I’d love to hear from some of you who try it out. Let me know how it goes!
Leslee.Shell@asu.edu
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