The Power of Interactive PowerPoint

Presented by Tracey McGrath and Kim Adair, School District of Philadelphia

In this age of technology, as teachers we are always searching for innovative ideas to
motivate our students. Using interactive PowerPoint in our classrooms has challenged the minds
of our older students and brought learning to a new dimension. We taught our 7th and 8th grade
students how to create simple interactive PowerPoint, which they designed to use with our
Kindergarten and 1st grade students. After learning the basics, some of our students moved on to
create more advanced games, which were modeled after game shows such as, Jeopardy and Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire and classic board games. This article will describe the steps that you
can use to get your students started on creating Interactive PowerPoint.

Basic PowerPoint Quiz

In this section, you will learn how to create a simple 10 question multiple-choice quiz.
Let’s create a PowerPoint based on single digit addition sums to 20.

Creating the slides

1. Open a new PowerPoint document. Create a title slide.

2. Click on the new slide icon and create a direction slide. Students may want to revisit
this after they have completed their question and answer slides.
3. Click on the new slide icon. Choose the bulleted list lay out. In the title box type a
question. Ex. What is 5 + 7? In the text box type in three answer choices. Students
should be reminded to randomly locate the correct answer on each slide.
4. Repeat step 3 until the student has created 10 question slides.
5. Click on the new slide icon and choose a blank lay out slide. Students should use a
combination of textboxes and graphics to create a Correct answer slide. At the bottom
of this slide they will be adding an action button to link it to the next question.
Linking will be explained in steps 10-16.
6. At this point students should duplicate the correct slide 10 times by choosing Insert
then duplicate or by coping and pasting the slide 9 times.
7. In slide sorter, students should click and drag a Correct slide after each of the 10
questions.
8. Repeat steps 5 through 7 to create Incorrect slides for each question.
9. Students can also create one Incorrect Slide and then create an action setting that links
to the ‘last slide viewed.’
10. Finally, create a new slide using a blank layout to show that the game has ended.

Linking Slides

Now that students have created all of their slides they need to make the PowerPoint
interactive by creating links and action buttons.

11. On the title slide, students should create an action button to get the game started.
On the drawing toolbar, choose the autoshapes button and select
action buttons. Click on the next button and draw the button on the
bottom of the slide.
12. In the action settings window choose next slide. This will take the user to the
direction slide.

13. Repeat steps 10 and 11 to create the same action button on the direction slide.
14. On the first question slide the students, will need to hyperlink each of the answer
choices to either the correct or incorrect slide. Refer to the slide sorter to check the
number of the correct and incorrect slides that you wish to link. Highlight the first
answer choice. In the menu bar choose Insert Hyperlink. In the hyperlink settings
window click on the document tab. Then click locate. Select the correct or incorrect
slide that corresponds with the question. Then click OK.
15. Repeat step 13 for each of the answer choices until all answers have been linked.
16. Repeat step 13 for each of the answer choices until all answers have been linked.
17. All “correct” slides should be linked to the next question. All “incorrect” slides
should be linked back to the original question slide or the ‘last slide viewed’ if only
one incorrect slide has been created so that person running the PowerPoint will
always meet with success.

Once you and /or your students have master the concept of linking and using action
settings. Then you are ready to create more complex games such as Jeopardy, Who
Wants to be a Millionaire, and game board style games.