Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

 Sub YourName()
 userName = InputBox("What is your name?")
 End Sub
 End Sub
 Sub BadProcedure()
 YorName
 If userName = "Ella" Then
 MsgBox ("Hello, big girl.")
 ElseIf userName = "Ada"
 MsgBox ("Hello, lit 
tle girl.")
 Else
 MsgBox ("Hello, " & userName)
 End If
 End Sub
172 De bug ging Tips

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10
Tem plates
In tro duc tion
In Chapter 9 you learned the last technical tricks presented in this book and
developed a bag of tricks to help you fix any prob lems that you might en counter.
Now you are ready to embark on using all the tricks you have learned to make
powerful in teractive projects. However, your students might not be ready to
make their own pow erful interactive projects. This chapter de scribes templates,
a tool you can use to do the technical and de sign work for your stu dents, al low-
ing them to con centrate on the con tent. With a template, you can use all the VBA
features that you want, and your stu dents can use all those VBA features with out
even knowing how to open the VBA Ed itor. This chapter describes templates
and pro vides sev eral ex am ples, in clud ing a so phis ti cated ex am ple that asks the
user for information and adds a slide with that information.
Vo cab u lary
• Design Tem plate (.pot) File • Tem plate
What Are Tem plates?
Previous chapters em phasized the use of mul timedia projects that are cre -
ated by the educator. As you have read this book and worked through the ex am-
ples, I hope you have got ten several ideas for projects that you want to create for
your stu dents. A more powerful use of multimedia is to have stu dents create their
own pro jects. Many stud ies have shown the pos itive educational im pact of students

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designing their own multimedia pro jects. See, for ex ample, Liu and Hsiao (2001),
Liu and Rutledge (1997), or Lehrer, Erickson, and Connell (1994). While this can
be a powerful ed ucational op portunity, it also can be im practical for a number of
reasons, not the least of which are that it is very time-consuming and that your stu-
dents might lack the technical skills to be suc cessful.
Have no fear. Your stu dents can still get many of the benefits of what you
have learned in this book without hav ing to learn it all (or any of it) themselves.
That is where templates come in. If you de sign a pro ject from scratch, you have
to de cide on the ap pro pri ate me dia, ap pro pri ate kinds of in for ma tion, and ap pro -
priate or ganization for your pro ject. In addition, you have to develop the pro ject
(including pre paring the media, the PowerPoint slides, the VBA, etc.). A tem-
plate al lows you to create some of these things for your students. Templates have
been used to fa cil i tate mul ti me dia cre ation by pro fes sional de sign ers; see, for
example, O’Connor (1991). Agnew, Kellerman, and Meyer discusses the use of
templates with stu dents: “The pri mary pur pose of giv ing stu dents a template for
their early pro jects is to al low them to con centrate most of their attention on
achieving academic objectives” (1996, p. 250).
Something as simple as a PowerPoint pro ject about an an imal can use a
template. You could tell your stu dents that the presentation should con tain four
slides: a ti tle slide, a slide about the an imal’s hab itat with a pic ture of the an imal,
a slide about what the animal eats, and a slide for cit ing re sources. Those simple
in struc tions are a ru di men tary tem plate. You have de signed the or ga ni za tion of
the project for the students.
However, you might go fur ther and ac tually create the slides for them, giv -
ing your students di rections about how to fill in the picture and the text. See Fig -
ure 10.1 for an example.