Online Teaching Fundamentals: Making Online PowerPoint Content Engaging: PowerPoint Hyperlinks 101
Written by: Patti Shank, PhD, CPT
Last month, I began to discuss making your PowerPoint slides interactive. Watching PowerPoint slides, even those that are narrated, is a fairly passive experience. (Don’t get me wrong. I think narrating your slides is imperative. Read my series on narrating your slides to find out why.) But really good instruction isn’t passive. It requires students to be actively involved. So your online slides should either be interactive or they should be short and combined with interactive elements, including discussions, practice, activities, and the like.
This month, I’ll be describing the basics of how to use PowerPoint’s hyperlinking capabilities in online PowerPoint presentations. We’ll take this up a notch or three in future articles. Let me start with defining hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are elements in a document that link to another place in the same document or to an entirely different document. (Document, as I use the term throughout this article, means a generic file or page, not a specific word-processed file.) When you click on a hyperlink, you follow the link.
PowerPoint does basics hyperlinks by itself
If you type an Internet address into a PowerPoint slide text box and press the enter key or the spacebar, PowerPoint automatically creates a live hyperlink. (Live means that it will “work” when clicked.) This works with Web addresses that start with http:// or www., email addresses with an @ symbol, and ftp addresses that begin with ftp://.
What this means is that you don’t need to know how to “program” these basic types of hyperlinks in PowerPoint. All you need to do is type them in and then press the enter key or the spacebar, and PowerPoint will make them work.
You can use this basic hyperlinking functionality to add Web addresses that you want students to visit, email addresses of people you want them to contact, and ftp sites to download course files (ftp sites aren’t used as often as they used to be, so if this type of address doesn’t sound familiar, you may not have a use for it!).
So, for example, you might provide a list of links for your students to visit for a specific assignment, such as:
* Kelley School of Business Salary Statistics https://ucso.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/ReportCenter/salaryStats.cfm
* BLS Wage Data by Area and Occupation data www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm
Or you may provide email addresses for people students should contact, such as Roger Smith rsmith@nstryud.edu.
Note: If PowerPoint, for some reason, does not automatically create these links for you, you have this feature disabled. In PowerPoint 2010, you can fix this by going to the File Tab and clicking on Options> Proofing and then clicking on the AutoCorrect Options Button. In the AutoFormat As You Type tab, make sure the checkbox for Internet and network paths with hyperlinks is checked.
Less-basic hyperlinks
You don’t have to stick with basic hyperlinks. You can also make text into hyperlinks by selecting the text to become a hyperlink, right-clicking, and choosing Hyperlink… from the right-click menu. When you do this, the Insert Hyperlink dialog box opens (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Insert Hyperlink dialog box
Now you need to decide what type of hyperlink you want to create. Do you want students to go to a specific file, a Web page, a slide in the presentation, or an email address?
If you look at Figure 1, you’ll see that your decision corresponds to the Link to: types on the left side of the dialog box. Let’s look at the most common types of links and how you set them in the table that follows.
Link type
Where it goes
How to set it
An existing file or Web page
This links to a specific file on a server or Web page.
Browse to the file or URL or input the URL.
A place in this document
This links to a specific slide in the current presentation.
Select the destination slide (shown in Figure 1).
An email address
This links to a specific email address.
In the E-mail Address text box, type the email address that you want to link to. In the Subject box, type the subject of the email message. (Some Web browsers don’t process the subject line.)
It’s very common to create links to Web addresses and to slides in the same presentation. Last month I talked about using questions on slides as a form of basic interaction. You could use links on slides to take students to Web pages that contain information about that question or to slides in the presentation that discuss that question. You could supply a link to the discussion forum so that after considering the information provided in the presentation, students can furnish their reaction.
Another way that hyperlinks may be useful in online presentations is to supply documents that you have uploaded for viewing alongside the presentation. For example, you may be discussing a specific study and want to have students read an abstract of the study. Or you may want them to download and review a spreadsheet related to the content you are describing.
In addition to text links, you can create links from objects on the page such as graphics. Graphical hyperlinks work the same as text hyperlinks. Simply select the object, right-click, and choose Hyperlink… from the right-click menu. Then select the type of hyperlink as discussed earlier.
It’s a good idea to make sure that your links work as expected. The easiest way to do this is to go to the Slide Show tab and use the From Current Slide button. Test the hyperlink on that slide and then click the Esc button to exit Slide Show. Test each link after you create it. Before going live with your presentation, test all the links in your presentation once more.
To remove a hyperlink, right-click it and choose Remove Hyperlink.
We’ll discuss some more complex hyperlink options next month.
Patti Shank, PhD, CPT, is a widely recognized information and instructional designer and writer and author who helps others build valuable information and instruction. She can be reached through her website www.learningpeaks.com and on Twitter @pattishank.
This article appeared in the July 1, 2011 issue of Online Classroom.
This article appeared in the July 1, 2011 issue of Online Classroom.
Articles
* Group Work, Discussion Strategies to Manage Online Instructor Workload
* How to be a ‘Teaching Head’
* Online Teaching Fundamentals: Making Online PowerPoint Content Engaging: PowerPoint Hyperlinks 101
* Teaching Online with Errol: Live Chats: Embrace Them, Don’t Fear Them!
* Tips from the Pros: Reducing Instructor Workload in Discussion Forums
