Bloated PowerPoints Are Not “Green”

Uploading oversized PowerPoint slideshows require more time on the computer and requires more storage space (on the student’s computer as well as on the ANGEL server). Bloated PowerPoint slides also take longer to load for a presentation. How do you get bloated files? The easiest method is to simply drag graphic images onto a PowerPoint slide without resizing, trimming or compressing. With the Clean Out Your Office days just past, let’s not forget that every little “green” effort is magnified and can make a difference.

Here’s how you can encourage your students to create more efficient slideshows. The first step is simply to crop unnecessary parts of the images used in PowerPoint in order to further reduce the file size. That can be accomplished within PowerPoint itself (right-click the image, select Size and Position and on the Size tab, use the Crop settings to remove portions of the image from the left, right, top of bottom).

However, the most important step in PowerPoint (2002, XP, 2003 and 2007) is to use the built-in compression (of images) feature. To use it, complete these steps, which once you walk through it once, you’ll find are simpler than the number of steps would indicate):

1. Click on any picture in your presentation.


2. You will see the Picture Tools > Format options appear (upper left corner of PowerPoint 2007) as shown below.
   
   
   Click on the Compress Pictures icon shown above.


3. You will see the Compress Pictures Dialog box. To compress all pictures, leave the Apply to Selected Pictures Only check box unchecked.


4. You can also reduce the file size further by selecting the Options button, which displays the Compression Settings dialog box.
   
   Next your students would select the Print, Screen or E-mail option to reduce quality further (to match intended use).


5. When done with settings on the Compression Settings dialog box, click OK.


6. Next, click OK on the Compress Pictures dialog box.


7. Finally, use File > Save as..." to save your presentation with a new filename (if you want to retain the higher quality version) and add descriptive text such as "For Review" or "Compressed” to the end of the filename. The student should keep the original PowerPoint file, or at least the original images, in case they wish to edit the pictures again.
   I used this process to shrink a 1.09 MB file (had three images on three slides) down to 339 KB (images were compressed using the Screen option). Using the E-mail option would have reduced the file size further.

• There is an additional way or two to reduce the file size of a PowerPoint slideshow.
  
  If you have Microsoft Office installed, you’ll also have access to an application called Picture Manager, a handy tool for cropping, scaling and compressing images singly or in batches. The Picture Manager can be accessed from the Start Menu by selecting All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Picture Manager. If students get their images to the sizes they actually need before inserting them into PowerPoint, the resulting presentation will be much smaller. Picture Manager comes with Office, so there’s no extra expense. Things like Google’s Picasa will do the same thing.


• If students are including videos, they should try to embed the video via YouTube, Vimeo or similar site, rather than insert the video.

Student Tracking Reports in ANGEL

If you want to use student tracking in ANGEL, turn it on before any student activity occurs. For JCCC's setup we've, by default, turned off tracking for each course, each semester. Tracking only begins to work after it is enabled. If tracking is turned on at some point after student activity begins, any reports will appear faulty for dates prior to the date and time when tracking was enabled.

By the way, you can turn on tracking at the folder level and that setting will cascade to all items within the folder. Turning on tracking for an entire folder of items is a lot easier than going to each individual item in the folder to enable tracking.

It’s also important to note that if a user exits ANGEL by closing their browser (as opposed to logging off using the ANGEL ‘Power’ button), ANGEL will not accurately record the tracking data for the student in that session.

ANGEL Tip: Copying and Pasting Questions from Word into ANGEL

Do you have paper exams that you wrote in Word and you wish there was an easy way to get them into ANGEL? Well, there is!

The first step is to get your exam into the proper format. Make sure you don’t have any headers or other info in your exam (that is, in the Word document). Each question should begin with a number and a period, followed by the question text. Then each answer option should be on its own line and begin with a letter and a period. On the next line, you type “ANSWER:” followed by the correct answer. Then skip a line and begin the next question. For example:

1. What is a baby llama called?
A. kid
B. cria
C. calf
D. foal
ANSWER: B

Once you have your exam in this format, highlight the whole exam and copy it to your clipboard (right-click > Copy or CTRL-C). Log in to ANGEL and go to your course. Create an assessment and click on Add Question. Choose Copy and Paste Questions. Delete the default text (in the box at the top of the screen) and paste in your exam (right-click > Paste or CTRL-V). Change the number of points in the Default Settings to the desired number of points per question and then click OK.

If your exam was formatted correctly, you will see all the questions appear on your exam. If there were errors in your formatting, the process will fail and you will need to discover where the errors in your file are.

Note: You can also start each question in your Word file with a “Q:” rather than a number and a period, but this is not required. If your questions are numbered, don’t change them all to Q’s!

Just for emphasis, you can either begin each question with “Q:” or a number followed by a period, such as “1.” But, there’s no need to change it to a Q, but if you do please note that the Q needs to be followed by a colon rather than a period.

In most cases you’ll use the optional ANSWER and POINTS settings, the other optional settings are rarely used.

If you get an error message, the most common cause is extra spaces (such as putting two spaces between the letter of a choice and the text, such as “a. answer choice”) or an extra carriage return between questions (there should only be one blank line between the end of one question and the beginning of the next, and no blank lines between the question text and the answer choices for that question).

Just for clarity: Your questions can be in a Word or other text document and the text of each question should conform to the following specifications.

1. Each question should begin on a new line.
2. The first line of each question should start with 'Q:' or the question number followed by a period ('1.', 2.', '3.', etc.).
3. If the question has choices the choices should immediately follow the question text.
4. Each choice should be on a line by itself.
5. Each choice should begin with a choice letter followed by a period ('A.', 'B.', 'C.', etc.).

There are optional settings that may be added to add the number of points, include an image, or feedback. Fort details, check the iTeach Online ANGEL manual or check the online Help under assessments.