Is PowerPoint a multimedia authoring environment?
Our experience observing K-12 multimedia authoring suggests that educators wanting to involve their students in multimedia authoring fall into two camps. One camp makes use of software designed for the K-12 environment and the other uses PowerPoint. Those who use PowerPoint tend to explain their approach in two ways. The argument is either “This is the type of software students will encounter outside of school” or “This software was already available so I used it”. We can see merit both in developing powerful tools tuned to the needs of learners and in an approach that advocates using general purpose tools for a variety of applications. We do not feel it is our place to make the argument that one of these approaches is superior and instead hope to give future and practicing teachers the basic information they need to make personal decisions. Because Microsoft Office products are so widely available and you probably have access to PowerPoint on a laboratory computer or possibly your own personal computer, your course instructor may prefer that you have experience with this product. Again, we cannot possibly provide a complete description of the capabilities of the many options that are available and we have decided to offer examples we know anyone could explore at low cost.
Even though we are not providing tutorials, we would offer one comment about PowerPoint. This software is very sophisticated and capable of far more than you might expect from observations of presenters using the software in very similar ways. You can create products with PowerPoint that would be used by others rather than used you by you as a presenter and these products can be interactive in that a user could select options available as buttons that control the user experience rather than being limited to stepping through a series of slides from the keyboard. Hence PowerPoint is versatile and has capabilities similar to other multimedia authoring environments we do explore.