Bring Your PowerPoint Presentations to Life

I see a lot of online courses where the instructors have created lots of PowerPoint presentations that I’m sure they used successfully in their face to face classes, but those presentations in an online class are missing the most important element – the instructor. Stand alone PowerPoint presentations are just not as effective as a presentation done with slides, so instructors need to transform those slides into a nice presentation with voice included. We have to add the instruction back into the class.

There a many different ways to record your PowerPoint presentations. The most obvious is to use the built in tools in PowerPoint. But I’ve found that method to be overly complicated. The easy is to just record your presentation using a tool like Jing, but if your presentation is longer than 5 minutes or you need to edit the video, you’re out of luck. So unless you buy and use Camtasia Studio, Jing’s big sister, then you’re out of luck. But for this post, let’s go for a free web tool to help us.

Knovio is the tool of choice for this post. Of course it’s in beta. It’s a web 2.0 tool and it’s free.

Knovio™ is an innovative tool for turning PowerPoint® slides into rich video presentations with just a web browser and webcam. With Knovio, you can take static PowerPoint slides to a new level with video and audio presentations that can be accessed anytime on-demand and shared with others through email and social media.

The way it works is you upload your existing PPT slides to Knovio. Then you record video of you talking over your slides. As you record, you can advance through your slides. Knovio will record not just the video of you talking, but it will also record your timing for advancing slides. Once you’re finished recording, the video is pretty much ready to go. The whole process is quick and simple and in minutes you will be creating and sharing personalized video presentations with students.

You have the option to share the video presentation with a link or you can embed the whole presentation into your LMS. I tried it in Canvas and it worked fine. That’s the method I would recommend. You can view an example on the Knovio website.