Record your presentation with speak using PowerPoint

Give your students access 24-7 to your lectures online and save valuable time you can use to interact with and activate the students in class (flipped learning). You can as well use it for distance learning courses. At the same time you make repetition easier.

What is it?

PowerPoint has a build-in function to record speak and animations. When done so you can export the presentation as a video and share it with your students.

There are two ways to record speak for your PowerPoint presentation:

  • Record as a single video (this guide): Use this method if you have animations in your slides. Your presentation should be saved as a video file (.mp4). It can be uploaded to ‘My media’ and shared in Absalon.
  • Add speak to each slide. This method is easier to use, but a bad choice if you have animations in your slides. You record an audio file for each slide. Your file should be saved as PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) and shared in ‘Files’ in Absalon.

What is the value?

The presentation can be recorded on your own computer using a quality headset or microphone. A video can be uploaded to Absalon and embedded whereever you have the Rich Text Editor. A PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) can be uploaded to Absalon in Files and shared with the student through a module or a link.

The students can watch the presentations whenever they want and as many times as they like. In this way you can save valuable time to interact with and activate the students in class.

Didactic Tips

It is important to use a good microphone. It is difficult or impossible to fix bad audio quality and it’s tiring having to listen to poor quality audio.

An online presentation should be kept short, 6-12 minutes (Philip Gou, 2013). A 45 minutes lecture can then be turned into several presentations or you can break up the presentation with a quiz (it is possible to insert question in a video in ‘My media’). The experience is that when recording you need a manuscript which on the other hand makes it easier to remember everything and to cut to the bone. At the same time there are no distractions so in most cases the presentation will be a lot shorter than done live.

It is recommendable to have a discussion or a chat in connections to the presentation giving the students the possibility to ask (and answer) questions. Especially if you do not bring it up in class. For further tips about presentations read Presentation with slides.

Putting lectures etc. online is an important part of flipped learning where they are a part of the preparation for the students who then are activated in class with various task.

Before you start your recordings, we highly recommend that you read this guide on how to create meaningful slides. In this guide, you will get some very useful didactical tips as well as practical tips.

Which Software Should I choose?

The recording is a build-in function in PowerPoint from Office 2016 and after. You can even add screenshots, screen recordings or media to the slides.

Tip. If your PowerPoint is already in presentation mode  you can start recording audio by pressing CTRL+WIN+R.

Alternatively you can use a screen recorder to produce a mp4 video. You can use Kaltura Capture (from ‘My media’ in Absalon) or Screencast-o-matic. Take a look at Screencast: record your screen.

Guide to produce a video using PowerPoint.

Guide to record audio slide by slide in PowerPoint.

 

If you want to know more about how to get started, please contact the e-learning consultants at your faculty.