Getting Started with Office Mix

To get started with Office Mix, you need an Microsoft Office account.  If you have signed up for the free Microsoft Office software available through LCCC, you can use that account information.  Once you have an Office account, you can download the Mix add-on from the Mix website and follow the directions for installation (you may need IT's help to install on your LCCC office computer).

Mix only works on Windows machines currently, and on PowerPoint 2013 or later.

Mix Options

When you open PowerPoint after installing Mix, you will see a new Mix option on your ribbon. Clicking that option will give you all of the Mix features.

Many of the features available on the Mix tab are already available in PowerPoint, but they are gathered here for ease of use. There include the media options available the Insert tab:

• Video
• Audio
• Screen recording

It also includes the Screenshot image option from the Insert tab.  However, if you want to add any other images, either online or on your computer, you still need to go to the Insert tab.

The new interactive features for Mix are available under the Quizzes Videos Apps icon:

Some of the common interactive features include:

• Quiz Questions
• Multiple Choice
• True False
• Free Response
• Web Page Viewer
• Multiple Response Poll

If you incorporate your Mix into Blackboard Learn and enable grading, the score students receive on the quiz questions determine the grade.

There are also some interesting subject-specific content options I recommend exploring. These include videos and exercises from Khan Academy, along with a number of different simulations and exercises for math and science.

Using an Add-In

The best layout for adding a Mix Add-In in a blank layout with no title or other object on it.  If you want to include anything else on the slide, like an image, graphics, or addition text, you can add that later.

When you select the Quizzes Videos Apps icon, a window pops up from which you choose which app to insert:

Make sure you select the Store option to see all of the available Add-Ins. To insert an Add-In, click the Add button to the right of the tool you want to use. This will insert the Add-In in an object box on the blank slide in your presentation.

If you are not adding any other object to your slide, I recommend sizing the Add-In to the full size of the slide.  This gives you the greatest amount of "real estate" for you question to reduce the need for scrolling; requiring scrolling may mean students miss some potential answers. I also recommend choosing the largest text size you can without scrolling to see the answers. If you are adding something else to the slide, you should do that now, and adjust the size of the Add-In box to be as large as possible.

Multiple Choice Questions

Here are some tips of adding multiple choice questions:

Start by entering your question text.

1. Adjust the text size to the largest possible.
2. Click the light bulb to add a hint for the question.
3. Set the options for the question. 
• If you want to allow students to choose more than one correct answer, select Allow Multiple Choices.
• To present the answer choices in random order, check the Shuffle Answers options.
• If you allow multiple tries, you can limit the number of tries students get before their answer is graded as incorrect.
4. After you enter an answer option, click the check mark to its right to indicate whether or not it is correct.  If the option entry box and the check mark are green, the option is a correct answer.
5. Clicking the chat icon next to any answer choice opens the feedback box for that choice. Feedback is shown for any selection the student makes, after they submit their answer.
6. You can add as many choices as you need.

True False Questions

True False questions are similar to Multiple Choice but with some key differences.  The only option available is to allow one retry; you cannot randomize the choices nor can you change the text of the choices.  If you want a two-choice question other than True False (like Yes No), you should use the Multiple Choice Quiz Add-In.

Free Response Questions

Free response or essay questions allow students to enter anything for their answer.  However, Mix will not assess them for inclusion in a grade for the activity. For a free response question, you can enter a question and a hint only.  You have no other options to set or choices to enter.

Narrating Your Mix

First, a warning...

Everyone hates their own voice when they first hear it.

But you get used to it.  There actually is a psychological reason for this; you normally don't hear your own voice coming from outside of your own head.  However, it is the same voice your students hear in the classroom, so get over it and just keep recording.  Eventually you won't even notice it.

I explained how to narrate PowerPoints, including some tips for a better narration, last year. While the tips still hols true, the narration was for a standard PowerPoint deck and in PowerPoint 2010.  Since Mix need Office 2013 or later to work, those narration steps are no longer accurate.

While you can use the recording available under the Slide Show tab, I recommend using the Slide Recording available on the Mix Tab.

Here are the important parts of the Mix slide recording screen:

1. Camera and Microphone: Select your camera and microphone.  I recommend using a headset microphone for the best audio quality.  You can choose to include a thumbnail of yourself on your slide, or a full screen image, but I recommend doing this only on an intro slide, if at all.  To do it well, you need to remember to look at the camera, not your slide or your keyboard, and there are enough other things to do while narrating to make that challenging.
2. Notes: You can toggle your notes on and off here.  One advantage of the Mix slide recording over the traditional PowerPoint slideshow recording is you can view all of your notes at once.  With the Slideshow recording I described in the earlier blog, you need to scroll through your notes to see them all.  Although these notes appear on your slide as you record, they are not part of the final recording.
3. Ink: You can draw on your slide using the Ink tools while you narrate.  While you can use your mouse to Ink your recording, it is easier to do with a stylus on a touch screen tablet or 2-in-1 or using a graphics pad.
4. Recording: Click the red circle to begin your recording. While recording a pause button will appear that will allow you to pause your recording and continue on at the same point.  The stop button ends and saves your recording.
5. Navigation: On a slide with multiple animations, you can move through the animations using the star button. Again, this is an advantage of using the Mix slide recording over the Slideshow recording where you don't have that same visual reference to animations on your slide. You can also move on to the next slide to continue your recording, but I recommend recording one slide at a time so you can use the recording tools to review and trim your recording.
6. Recording Tools: Once you have completed recording your slide and clicked the stop button, you can preview your recording to see if you are satisfied with it.  If not you can rerecord it. Using the Edit Recording button, you can delete that recording or trim it, editing off any pause you may have at the beginning or the end of the slide.  Since PowerPoint saves each recording for a slide on that slide, recording one slide at a time this way will help ensure that you don't talk over the transition from one slide to the next.

The screen looks slightly different while you are narrating your slide.

Instead of a record button, you now have pause and stop. You still have your navigation buttons, but you will not be able to move to the next slide until move through all your animations.  The camera and microphone controls are no longer visible, and all your Ink options are no in a single column.  The red dashed box outlines the area of the screen that is recorded, so if you do Ink your slide while recording, be sure to keep your annotations within that boundary.

Publishing

To share your completed Mix, you need to publish it to the Office Mix web site, which you can do in such a way that only you and your students will see it.  You can also save your mix as a video, which is useful for students who want to review your Mix on their mobile devices, without completing the activities.

Just click the Upload to Office Mix tab and follow the steps from there.  You are prompted to sign into your Office Mix account, and then you have the option of uploading an new Mix or updating an existing one.  To allow your students to view your Mix as a video on their phone or tablet, without the ability to answer questions, check the option to create a video; you can also download this video as an MP4 for other uses.  Please note that creating the video takes about as long as the Mix is itself at a minimum - a 20 minute Mix will take at least 20 minutes to create a video and upload the video and Mix.

 After you upload your Mix, you can view it online.  I strongly recommend that you take the time to test your audio on your narration, verify that your questions work correctly, both for right and wrong answers, and that any embedded media like videos or web pages you use work.  If not, you can make the change in your Mix in PowerPoint and reupload, updating your existing Mix.

At this point, you want to change the options on your Mix to make it available to your students.

In order to allow students to access your Mix through Blackboard Learn or via a web link, choose the Unlisted option.  This will also prevent anyone else from seeing your Mix.  You also have the option to make it available for others to use under a Creative Commons license and to allow comments.  I have not used those options yet, because I am still modifying my Mixes, but in the interest of promoting Open Education Resources, I will use that option shortly.

Finally, Mix offers very useful analytics. Slide analytics include the average amount of time spent on each slide compared to its recorded duration. For question slides, you can see how many students attempted the question, how long it took them on average to answer the question, and what percentage of students answered the question correctly.

Visitor analytics gives you information about how much of the Mix each student completed, how well they did on the questions, and how long they spent completing the Mix, including watching the video and answering questions. As you can see in this example, although the Mix is about 14 minutes long, most students were taking closer to 20 minutes to complete the Mix, including answering the questions. That is another reason why you should try to keep your narrations as short as possible.

Finally, you can look at the analytics by exercise.  This tells you exactly how each student answered each question, with correct answers in green and incorrect answers in red.  That helps you quickly scan the results and see which questions students are getting wrong the most often. That information can point you to certain improvements you might make, either in the wording of a question or in the explanation of a concept.

I hope this has shown how Mix is a very valuable tool in providing interactive instruction to your students and to gather information on how you can improve your course materials.  If you try one new thing this summer for the next academic year, make it Office Mix.