OfficeMix-Off to a Great Start in 2015

I trust you had some time to rest and recreate during the holidays and that you are now refreshed and rearing to go. As I start to plan for the semester ahead I am generally excited with all the possibilities and how I can engage my students in their learning. For the past couple of years I have taught many of my courses as a hybrid-meeting on campus for half the semester and teaching the rest online, which has worked out really well. Last semester, I experimented using OfficeMix an new plug-in for PowerPoint that makes the creation of digital assets extremely easy. For teachers who have wanted to flip the classroom, but are still looking for a

tool to help in the creation of material I would recommend that you install the OfficeMix plug-in which is available on the Windows platform for PowerPoint 2013 or Office 365. 

OfficeMix adds the ability to add digital ink (great if you are using a Surface Pro 2 or 3) , videos (Khan Academy, You Tube), simulations (PhET Simulations), quizzes, screencasts, screen captures-complete with user analytics. OfficeMix works great on a Surface Pro 3 because you can take advantage of the webcam and record audio as well as video and include it in your Mix. Likewise, having access to the digital ink on the Surface Pro 3 lends itself to marking up slides or for white boarding directly on a slide.  

One of the more challenging aspects of flipping the classroom for teachers is figuring out how to publish the material and where to publish it to. OfficeMix remedies this problem by hosting your Mixes in the Cloud-at no cost. With a click on the Upload button your Mix heads to the Cloud, making your last mile to publishing effortless. Once you have published your Mix you can get the link or embed code and set the permissions making it easy to restrict who has access to your material. If your Mix includes a quiz you can view your students responses in your Mix Dashboard on the web or download the results to an Excel formatted file.

Working with Mix is easy and students who are using a Windows or Macintosh computer can access the Mix with all of the interactivity. So for example if you insert a science simulation students will be able to interact with it when they open the Mix. If you will be viewing your Mix's on a tablet you can always export or publish them as a video-but your students will lose out on the interactivity. Teachers will find using OfficeMix to be straight forward and easy to use with lots of possibilities. 

The OfficeMix Team is constantly updating the plug-in and bringing more functionality with every update. Looking ahead I would really like to see that OfficeMix can publish in HTML 5 so that we don't lose out on any of the interactivity when view a Mix on a tablet. Likewise, I would like to see the OfficeMix Team add a way to insert Close Captioning when publishing a Mix. Despite these minor things, give OfficeMix a try- I know you will find it a very formidable authoring tool in your content creation! Happy Mixing!

Here is an example of an OfficeMix I used with my students:



If you will attending the NJECC Conference next week I will be doing a session on using the Surface Pro 3 & OfficeMix in the flipped classroom. Likewise, I will be doing a session at the ATIA Conference in Orlando later this month on using the Surface Pro 3 with OfficeMix- so join me if you can and please drop by and say hello!