Office Mix

What is Office Mix?

Office Mix is a PowerPoint add-on that allows you to draw on slides and have those annotations recorded inside the PowerPoint file, and record the audio while you present it. When you’re finished, you can save the resource as a video to share with the class, or play it back any time by putting the PowerPoint in Presentation Mode.

Classroom Ideas

Bring your Presentations to Life

“Whether you are leading a lesson using a PowerPoint, or asking students to come up to the front, you can now record that interaction within the presentation; this includes using a pen to annotate the screen, in order to capture the lesson or student evidence for later use.”

Credit: L. Cooper, Malcolm Arnold Academy

In this example, A-Level History students were asked to interpret a series of sources from a historical event - a great activity for inference and deduction.

After paired discussion, students came to the front and annotated the comic-style sources on the PowerPoint slide using Office Mix on the big screen, whilst discussing and justifying their thoughts. Their voices and annotations were also recorded.

At the end of the session, the teacher could export the video as a great resource to share with the group. The video included the original sources, the annotations over the top of the pictures, and the students’ thoughts on the sources - in their own words. The teacher then shared the video with students as a revision tool, which was revisited in the next lessons. Simple, quick, effective.

Click here to learn how.

Voice Overs in Office Mix

A great idea from a visit to Briar Hill Primary School for using Office Mix. The context was the class preparing short advertising videos for a project - where they needed to match the text they would present to the timing of action on a video. Having marked the key moments in the movie track they set out to draft and rehearse their voiceover to match the timings and then perform it.

Office Mix first allowed the teacher to grab a selection of the screen in which the required video was playing and insert it into a slide (> Insert Screen Area). He could then make a copy of that slide for every group of pupils and when ready they could go to the screen and use Mix to record their voiceover (the webcam on the screen providing a well-placed microphone for three people standing about a metre from the screen. Although the rest of the class are in the room, the audio is reasonably good as the web cam isolates the input to quite a narrow field in front of the screen.

The finished Powerpoint deck can of course be exported in several ways....

Saved as a Powerpoint file in Google Drive or OneDrive, shared and the link used in ClassDojo...
Saved directly to Office 365 video, allowing the teacher to publish all the videos in a single file to the class video channel for later use in class or for viewing from home.
Saved as an mp4 video for use... anywhere.

Training Videos

Office Mix: How-to

Using Office Mix to create videos from PowerPoint Presentations, adding interactive assessments and sharing your Mix with students.

Office Mix: Looping a visual demonstration

Using Office Mix to create a 'looped' presentation that displays a visual demonstration on the big screen at the front without the need to restart each time. Simple and effective!

Useful Links

Link here to for the Office Mix download

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