Since someone (thanks Sheila) asked how to do these animations in Power Point, I recorded one of the animations that I made last semester … while I was making it. of course, then I forgot about it, and never posted it because my queue of draft posts is so long. Today I thought I’d resurrect this one.

To view the final animated sequence (about deriving the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus), watch the short produced video clip here.

To view the “How to” video on how to make this animation sequence, watch the longer video here (about 13 minutes).

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I promised (long ago) to share some of the Action Button material that you can do in PowerPoint and I think the easiest way to convince you to try this out is to show you an example of what you can do.

If you’ve ever done programming in Visual Basic or Flash, the principles of action buttons should be pretty straightforward to you. The buttons essentially act as hyperlinks to other slides in your presentation. Thus, you can put an overview on the first slide, and then use action buttons to allow users to jump to specific topics of interest to them.

This is an interactive demo (read-only file) that I created using PowerPoint and Action Buttons in about an hour that shows visually how to find the domain and range from a graph using projections onto the x- and y-axes. Normally, this is a fairly difficult concept for students to visualize, and so I think the animation of this would really help to make the concept clear. Just a little warning, although the file seems to run perfectly on my computer, it begins to get glitchy once it’s on the web and I can’t figure out why. You may have to click more than once to activate some of the animations.

The inspiration to do this type of PowerPoint cam initially from Kenrick Mock’s blog post on Active Learning with PowerPoint. Also, a thanks to Bob Mathews for help with a little technical glitch I just couldn’t figure out!

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Barbara Kaskosz and Doug Ensley have put together a new site for learning to use Flash & Math with all their tutorials (beginning, intermediate, and advanced.

To see some of the Flash applications that have been built, go to the Math DL site and search for Flash/Shockwave resources (as shown in the image below).

Amongst other things, there is a nice collection of tools for multivariable calculus developed by Barbara.

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