Office Mix is a PowerPoint plugin that enables you to take new and existing presentations and transform them into interactive online learning resources that you can easily publish to your website and/or Blackboard. You can use the tool to add:
Voice and Audio narration to your slides
Annotate you slides in real-time
Record your screen to demonstrate a program or process
Quizzes, polls and other interactive content
An excellent range of resources, including some more advanced features, like embedding mixes in webpages, can be found at mixforteachers.com
When you come to publish your mixes you can either publish to a personal account or use your University account which Microsoft refers to as ‘Work or School Account’. Simply sign in with your username@newcastle.ac.uk (e.g. nmb84@newcastle.ac.uk) and your university password.
If you want to track your students’ progress and engagement with your mixes via your Blackboard Module you can use the integrated Office Mix tool in the VLE. This will give you stats on a range of things that you can link to individual students including how many attempts they took to answer questions and time spent on specific slides.
Using the Office Mix Blackboard tool
Please note: Office Mix is currently in Beta which means that it could change or be removed completely in the future. We believe this is very unlikely given the growing popularity of the product and as your mix PowerPoints will remain functional as presentations it is very low risk experiment should you wish to try it.
You can install Office Mix on your personal machine by clicking here
If you wish to install Office Mix on a University machine simply request that your computing officer apply the following policy: ‘4 NUIT Office Mix Beta’