PowerPoint with Mix to Produce School News

How to Create a Morning News Program Using Microsoft PowerPoint with Mix

For many years, we aired our morning news program live through our school’s television distribution system. With the arrival of interactive white boards, our school district quit supporting the television system, so we needed a new way to put on the news. After much experimentation, we have found an easy and inexpensive way to produce and show our morning news.

We have installed Mix with our PowerPoint program. Mix allows you to record audio, video, or inking onto a slide. Using the computer’s web camera and microphone, we record the anchor reading the slides and writing out the answer to our daily math or spelling problem. One nice feature of Mix is that you only record one slide at a time, so that if an error is made, you only have to re-record one slide. You can add special effects and transitions as well as web links, documents, photos, and more. You can also have your principal or teachers record a slide if they want to appear on the show. I do a daily book talk, featuring one of the titles in the library.

Our physical education teacher does an exercise or dance routine for each news show. She chooses students from her PE class to appear on the morning show as a reward for good behavior. She either exercises or dances with these students and we record them with a digital video camera. We than upload that video to our school’s You Tube channel. After uploading, we embed the You Tube link into a slide on our presentation. This allows the teachers to link to the You Tube video so their class can participate in the exercise program every morning.

After we are finished creating the show, we use Mix to upload it to the Office Mix website. There are different security settings so that you can limit the audience and allow comments, if wanted. Mix then provides you with a link that you can send to your teachers. I also put that link on our school’s Facebook page so that the parents can also enjoy our morning show. We’ve had a lot of positive community reaction to our morning news show. The students and staff enjoy watching it every day. The students on the news crew gain valuable experience in creating and filming a daily show, and they have a good time working together.

Click here to see the show we aired on January 26, 2016.

Michelle Chase is the librarian at Great Falls Elementary School in Great Falls, South Carolina. She loves helping students succeed at reading, writing and expressing themselves. She used to be a high school French teacher, but likes being a librarian because she gets to play with the books all day.