Getting the best from PowerPoint: 2 and 3-dimensional animations

The following discussion and examples of animation techniques within PowerPoint follows on directly from the article „Getting the best from PowerPoint: 2 and 3-dimensional anima-tions‟ that was published in the last edition of Blended Learning in Practice, pages 20 to 27. In that article I discussed basic animation of text and graphical objects and introduced the use of three-dimensional objects to add extra impact to PowerPoint presentations. The key benefits of utilising PowerPoint animations were discussed in detail in the June issue of Blended Learning in Practice, but to summarise, one of the key benefits of these techniques is to aid in the explanation of complex concepts and clearly animations are likely to be of particular use to visual learners. In this edition of Blended Learning in Practice I will again use examples from my own teaching (glaciology and physical geography) to illustrate a variety of animation tech-niques, with an emphasis on some of the more subtle controls that can be employed to „force‟ PowerPoint to produce the effects we desire. Although the examples relate to a specific subject area, the techniques can be deployed to a limitless number of topics and subject areas, and the overview animation (see below) provides a non-subject specific example of several techniques covered in this issue of Blended Learning in Practice.