EUREKA! A PowerPoint movie with sound!

I've been struggling a bit in the last few days to create a PowerPoint movie of an activity for ED410: Foundations in Literacy. The activity comes from one of our texts Becoming a Reader: A Development Approach to Reading Instruction. This activity, Context Clues, done with PowerPoint is one of the really meaningful examples of technology improving the delivery of the content. I plan to share how to do this activity with students at the FNSBSD/UAF mini-conference on technology in May.

My problems began when I ran out of time in class to discuss it on Monday night. I wanted to be sure the students had an example to see how the finished product turned out - but the finished product needs a presenter. I realized that if I turned it into a movie, the students could view it before trying to create one of their own.

I first tried to add narration to the Powerpoint through ProfCast but I lost all my animation.

I then discovered that I could add Narration within PowerPoint by going to Slide Show - Record Narration. I still lost my animation within one slide when the file converted to a movie file. (.mov) The activity can be done easily on multiple slides without using animation - so I changed the formatting, recorded narration again, and "voila!" I had a .mov file from the PowerPoint that students could possibly see via youtube.com.

Then my struggles began again....even though the PowerPoint is a .mov file, youtube.com told me that it could not deal with this file:My students were left looking at this on Blackboard:I planned to contact Skip to get help when I had an idea...what if I uploaded the PowerPoint movie to iTunes and then converted it for iPod/iPhone? That would give me a different format that might work with youtube.com. Look at this:


Not only did it work fantastically, the iTunes .m4v file is only 1.4mb and the PowerPoint movie file is over 18mb.

Eureka!!!!!!!