Microsoft Sway
Sway is a free online product from Microsoft. All you need is an Outlook email account. Sway is a storytelling app that presents itself as an alternative to PowerPoint. The purpose of Sway is to present concepts quickly, easily, and clearly. It is cloud-based. This makes it easy to collaborate on Sway projects. It is also easy to share projects with the world.
Sway is built to tell stories. It uses cards to gather concepts in the form of images, video, and text. Cards are grouped to combine concepts similar to paragraphs in a narrative.
Sway uses themes to quickly build eye pleasing presentations and stories. Themes take the guesswork out of designing backgrounds and selecting fonts. This is a definite plus. My students often spend too much time selecting colors and fonts. I would rather they spend time developing content.
There are plenty of choices for themes. There are options to change the colors and fonts. Emphasis and accents options for text provide a way to focus the user’s attention on content.
We import a variety of media to create a nice visual presentation. Images and video can be imported from online resources. Searches for online content are filtered for media in the Creative Commons. This assures that content does not violate copyright. It is just as easy to add our own content from a variety of sources. These sources include OneDrive, Google Drive, Flickr, and our device.
We are able to pull in existing PowerPoint presentations and Word documents. It does a fairly good job of importing these document formats. For best results, the documents should be formatted with proper headings.
We don’t need any special application to create or view Sway presentations. A browser is all we need. Sway presentations work on any device. This includes mobile phones.
Pedagogy
Sway is a useful tool for teachers and students. It provides a way for teachers to deliver instructional content with a minimum of effort. Better yet, it provides a way for students to present what they understand.
Sway provides a way for students to gather what they have learned and present it to teachers and pears. Students synthesize their information and reflections into media content that conveys what they know or understand. The media content includes images, video, and audio.
It provides a very useful formative assessment for teachers. It is a good way for students to present information on projects through project-based learning. The use of media and short information blocks makes it easy to review what students know. The focus is less on the skill needed to use the tool and more on using it to create rich content.