42 Sway (in Canvas) with Ian Muehlenhaus — 09.23.2016

As a Microsoft tool to create and share polished, interactive reports, presentations, personal stories, and more, Sway alone kicks PowerPoint up a notch. Ian Muehlenhaus, from Geography, kicks it up another by integrating Sway in Canvas.

Takeaways:

• Sway is free, cloud-based, and part of the Office 365 suite you can access along with your campus email and calendar.
• Whereas PowerPoint seems geared for structured presenting/teaching of content in a face-to-face setting, Sway seems more geared for individual, self-paced absorbing/learning of content in a blended or online setting.
• It’s simple to transform documents created in MS Word into Sways. Sway beautifully maintains the structure while using headings to create a more interactive, animated eDocument that automatically reformats content to fit effectively on whatever screen it is accessed with (i.e. desktop and mobile look different, but are structured similarly).
• Sway allows (forces?) more focus on content and less on trying to control formatting (you’ll need to let go of some design control with it).

If you’re interested in learning more to get up and running with Sway, watch the videos below or review the Activity sheet.

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Ian’s story:

Want to know what happened next? Watch the discussion video:

What is Sway?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pcg6DGO9hpI