Technology and Music Education

PowerPoint Exercise 1
Instructions and Resources

This exercise calls for you to write a five-slide PowerPoint presentation about any topic you choose. The default topic is a presentation about yourself called "About Me".

More about the exercise will be discussed in class.

When complete, email a compressed folder containing your PowerPoint presentation to the assignments email address by February 22. (This is a "soft" due date.)

We will review the presentation in class to make sure it works properly.

Please go through the following instructions and resources before starting work on your presentation.

IMPORTANT rules to always follow when creating a PowerPoint presentation:

1. Create a new folder for your presentation. In the lab create it inside your personal folder. ALWAYS create a separate folder for each presentation before starting to work on it.
2. Open PowerPoint, create a new presentation and IMMEDIATELY save it in the folder you just created.
3. IMPORTANT: BEFORE you insert any media into your presentation, i.e. photos, audio, video, etc., place the media file into the folder you created for this presentation. Once the file is located in the presentation folder, you can insert it into your presentation. NEVER insert any media into a presentation if it's located outside the presentation's folder.
4. When you're going to view your presentation on another computer, take the entire folder with you. Everything you've inserted into your presentation will be in that folder and your presentation will run smoothly.

Terms You Should Know – Embedding and Linking
The reason why creating a unique folder for each presentation you make AND copying all media into that folder BEFORE inserting it has to do with the way PowerPoint stores media. Depending on the type of media, sometimes PowerPoint will embed the media file, that is, the media will be stored inside the presentation file. In other cases (e.g. audio and video files), PowerPoint will link to the file, that is, it will create a link to the location of the file on your computer.

Embedded media will always work properly because it's contained in the PowerPoint file itself. Linked media will not work properly when your presentation is viewed on another computer because the link in the presentation will be pointing to a location on the computer where you created the presentation. If the media you've inserted into your presentation is in the same folder as the PowerPoint file AND you've taken the folder with you to another computer for viewing, the linked media will work properly.

More PowerPoint Tutorials

1. InDesign Online Tutorials
2. PowerPoint 2016 Tutorial
3. PowerPoint 2002 Tutorial from Microsoft (a Flashpaper version of a WORD document)
4. (More advanced) Creating Enhanced Multimedia Presentations Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 from Microsoft (WORD document)

What You Can Do in PowerPoint
Originally done in Write, a free program that originally came with Windows, here's a good example of how you would use an audio editor to create musical excerpts to use in a lesson. The presentation was later done in PowerPoint, with this Web version being done in Flash which for many years was an excellent delivery system to use on the Web for presentations like this. BTW, the score examples were done in Finale, and we'll learn how to do that later in the semester. (See, your first exercises working with Audacity were about more than just learning about how to create ringtones. ;-)

Here's another example - a PowerPoint presentation that was converted into a YouTube video.

Our PowerPoint Rubric
Here is an example of the rubric we'll use at the end of the semester to assess everyone's PowerPoint presentations. Start using it now to assess what you're creating.