Mouse Mischief is a tool that Microsoft makes available free of charge, and that allows teachers to work with Microsoft Office PowerPoint to make interactive presentations. With Mouse Mischief, teachers can add multiple choice questions to their presentations, and large groups of students can answer the questions using mice connected to the teacher’s PC.

Mouse Mischief not only gives students the ability to engage, have fun, and learn in new, interactive ways, but it also provides teachers with a more affordable alternative to purchasing expensive student response systems, commonly known as clickers, by letting students use affordable wired or wireless USB mice that their school already own.

How does Mouse Mischief work?

It’s simple. After Mouse Mischief is installed, the Mouse Mischief toolbar will appear as part of the PowerPoint ribbon when a new or old PowerPoint presentation is opened. This intuitive Mouse Mischief toolbar lets teachers add interactive elements such as multiple-choice question slides with a single click.

When the teacher opens a Mouse Mischief enabled presentation, students in the classroom can answer each question by clicking it with their uniquely designed mouse cursor. Once the students have selected their answers, the teacher can display the correct answer.

The best part? Mouse Mischief gives teachers the option to have their students answer questions individually or as part of a team, in order to encourage both competition and collaboration in the classroom.

How does the teacher stay in control?

Special teacher controls allow the teacher to disable student’s mouse cursors, navigate between slides, set timers, and more. With Mouse Mischief the teacher is always in control, whether there are two or 25 cursors on the screen.

Please also check out Death By PowerPoint to learn alternate ways to spice up a presentation.

Below Ironically is a PowerPoint Presentation about how boring and uninteresting the bulk of PowerPoint Presentations are.  This presentation gives you some advice on how to get it right and avoid killing your audience with boredom.

Whether you use Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher or any other application you will find a great collection of hints and tips for all office. apps  Every tutorial is short and sweet and has images to help you make sense of it.  This is a very simple and straightforward sight but highly effective. Check it out here

What is it:  PowerPoint is probably one of the most versatile programs available to you as a teacher and can be used in so many ways to enhance teaching and learning.  I bet that you have never seen it used like this before as quite a powerful artistic and animation resource.

I know we have all had death by PowerPoint Sessions where the presenter reads boring slides word for word but they are really giving this great program a bad rap.  I use it all the time to create e-portfolios that are are media rich, quick and secure by embedding and inserting content from nearly everything we do in the classroom.

How can ypu use it in the Classroom:  Powerpoint in the classroom is a great site to teach you some of the more advanced and cool tricks tucked away inside PowerPoint that we often overlook. with simple to follow visual tutorials that will catch you students attention and give them plenty of new tools and ideas to present and create their ideas.

What level of expertise is required:  Very little this is for all audiences and I guarantee you will look at PowerPoint differently after giving this a run.  The site is available here.

This will be old news to most but it is new to Edgalaxy.  Slideshare should be considered the youtube of Slide shows.  Where people - and you hopefully can upload your PowerPoints or Keynotes up to slideshare for the whole world see and pillage.  It has tens of thousands of brilliant presentation on a multitude of topics and the best thing is that you can embed them into your own blog (see below) or download and edit them depending if the author has permitted this.  Check it out here - below is an embedded presentation for the uninitiated