Putting Office Mix into practice

I blogged about some of the awesome features I learned about with Office Mix here. I have made some mixes before, but they have mostly just utilised the inking feature and screen recordings to demonstrate how to complete exams questions – or one was a slap dash job for #educampdunners that I really wanted to get to and couldn’t.

So I have decided to put some of these ideas into action and make a Mix for my Yr 10 class tomorrow – I am away on a sports exchange and I am not sure which reliever they will get. It was a good chance to have a play and I am hopefully they will like it.

We have been working on forces, so the PhET simulation on forces was a given. But in Mix, there is also an option to add in a Kahn Academy video – and there is a nice, simple 8 minute long video on balanced and unbalanced forces so I have also included that. It was the same process as adding the other apps – just go to the Mix tab, select apps, select Kahn academy and away you go.

I am pretty pleased with the final product – it is not perfect but then what is? And it is perfectly ok for my students to see – in fact I think if it was perfect they wouldn’t trust it was me. I realised after play back I forgot to turn my mic on for the first few slides – so need to remember to do that as the sound quality is much better using the head set than the mic on the pro.

Most importantly for time poor teachers, in all this took me 35 minutes to make – a little longer than just setting some workbook pages perhaps but hopefully much more meaningful relief. I will make sure I ask my class how they found it, and tweak as necessary 🙂 Hopefully they will keep getting better.