Microsoft Teams: Harnessing the Power of PowerPoint Presentations
This year has been an exciting year between teaching high school and going back to school for UX design. I’ve done prototyping, interviews, competitive analysis, and research projects. For instance, I had to create a research project on the user experience and evolution of lawnmowers. After completing it, my tutor recommended keeping a journal of different experiences with software and devices.
Microsoft Teams, I think, deserves mention, don’t worry, Microsoft; it’s not all bad! Starting off the school year, presentations using PowerPoint had a basic implementation. We had two ways of presenting, one you could present as the PowerPoint giving viewers the ability to flick through slides at their pace or where you had control over it. If the user didn’t touch it, it would go with the presenter’s slide choice. The presentation was excellent except when you have a unit per PowerPoint file and 100+ slides of scrolling. There wasn’t a way to jump to a specific slide or to quickly move between slides. Graphic intensive PowerPoints could take a while to load on the viewer’s side and client-side. A quick fix approach to this problem was to share the PowerPoint file, but not as a presentation but as a working file. Sharing the PowerPoint portion of the screen allows you to click through to the slide you needed. But the viewer saw the entire PowerPoint user interface.
1st Noticeable Update
Ut-oh! The first Microsoft Teams update had evident effects on presentations. Teams would automatically put the meeting into presenter mode, and so no longer could you share it on the board because it had a small presentation screen and the presentation notes. (if we had to multipurpose the presentation with a live class and those online).
However, the good news is we could finally flip quickly through slides to find the correct slide using the slider bar at the bottom of the presentation. Mr. Villinger (the other art teacher) and I found that the Microsoft Teams Twitter team is very active, and we were going back and forth with them to find out how to get the presentation into the old presentation mode where it was just the full slide to view. Finally, after some research, we found a secret easter egg keyboard shortcut that switches between the two modes. Our new user strategy became, start in presenter mode, find the slide we needed to start class, hit the secret keyboard shortcut, and go into presentation mode. The class was ready to go!
2nd Noticeable Update
After the winter holiday, we returned to another new update, but I prefer the new changes. They now have an option right under the presentation to change between presenter and presentation mode. We didn’t need to keep a hotkey written on the board to remember switching between modes. They kept the slide bar to pick which slide you like quickly, but they also added the additional option to get a grid of all presentation slides for a quick selection. Where I have large numbers of slides with a bit of information each, it makes it much more manageable. I can now quickly move between slides, and if you close the presentation and reopen it, it prompts you to return from your last point. Presenting over teams has become much more streamlined.
Possible Future Updates?
A few notes that I hope to see soon, a place you can put in the number of slides the user wants to display instead of searching through the grid or slide bar. Quick and easy and less interface involved, which can take a little less time loading. Video files, if played from the presenter side doesn’t play audio for the participants. But if the participants in the meeting push play, they can listen to it and watch it. I usually let them know they need to watch the current video, and I will put my teams on mute so they don’t hear an echo of it being played in class.
Overall I have been enjoying watching the meeting app grow, as I am growing along with it. Taking time to create lessons and teach them, I have adapted and learned new approaches to simultaneous teaching.
