Save your presentations as PowerPoint shows

Previously I mentioned how you can develop PowerPoint presentations as guided individual learning activities by placing your presentation into Kiosk mode. There is one flaw here in that students can escape the presentation and scroll through the slides (and even mess around with them).

One way to avoid this is to save your presentation as a PowerPoint Show rather than as a presentation. You do this simply by changing the .ppt notation when you save the presentation to a .pps ending. By doing this the presentation will open directly into show mode and students cannot escape to look at the individual slides.

Naturally it is important to save your presentation as a normal .ppt master file first. This then means that it is possibly to make tests, quizzes and study modules that the students can work through in a pre-designated order.

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Setting your presentation to be a self-running presentation with forced navigation

If you want to place a Powerpoint show on your school server/website or Moodle for the students to view but you want them to be able to flick through it in a set order then you can set the presentation to be in ‘Kiosk’ mode. This means they will have to work through the presentation sequentially guided by the navigation buttons you set.They cannot scroll from slide to slide quickly.

This is useful if you wish to programme your presentation as an interactive quiz (using ActiveX controls). They cannot flick forwards and backwards unless you place in hyperlinks, action buttons etc. so it is important to ensure that all slides have navigation buttons. Also normal animations do not work so additional work has to be added to ensure animations happen (see additional links). You can also add voice narration (again see extra link).

You can only escape the presentation in this model by pressing escape, students can then see all the slides

To set your show to run in Kiosk mode:

1. Click ‘Slideshow’ on the menu bar

2. Click on ‘Set up show’ in the drop down menu, a new window will appear

3. In the top left hand corner of the new window under ‘Show type’ click the radio button that says ‘Browsed at a kiosk (full screen)

4. Click ok and save your presentation

Additional help:

Create a self-running presentation

A work around for on click animations

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