With interactivity becoming the staple of our online lives, it seems only natural that we should give a thought to how interactivity can be enhanced while making a PowerPoint presentation.
Conferences in the brick-and-mortar world made it easier to involve the audience and keep them with you all the way, through live polls, quizzes, or simple Q&A.
However, there are a host of digital solutions that are equally effective in the opportunities they present. Here’s a quick preview for what’s available for free.
- Inbuilt PowerPoint tools which allow quizzes and polls – these are templatized and can be used to pose multiple-choice questions. Correct answers can be highlighted by the presenter and a fun element can be added by adding in sound effects for suspense, countdown and applause.
- One of our favourites is the Creative Game Show template that PPT allows – you can present your quiz or poll as a Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune game, and enhance audience participation by including names and scores.
- PowerPoint add-ins are brilliant if you want to add QR codes that lead to added layers of information, or simulations.
- Mentimeter is an excellent interactive presentation software with a free plan that offers 5 PPT quizzes and 2 questions per presentation. All you have to do is create your quiz or poll, using the bar charts, pie charts, graphs for information, or word-clouds for ideating, and share the code provided by Mentimeter with your audience. They will click on the link, and you will get their responses and inputs live, in real-time, without the headache of downloading and installing. Free and easy on all fronts!
- Slido offers a similar interactive option, with their free basic plan of 3 polls and a hundred participants per event. A bonus that Slido has is that it can be easily integrated with vid-con tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, as well as Google slides. All you have to do is install the add-on, and you can add live-polls and Q&A into your presentations as you like.
These simple but effective solutions and offerings remind us that the best things in life are sometimes free, and that the template exists to be tweaked!
Enjoy taking your next presentation to the next level of interactivity…