Using Morph for education - PowerPoint Tutorial

- [Instructor] Morph is a new transition in PowerPoint for Office 365 that will recognize common PowerPoint objects across multiple slides and then resize or reorient them during a presentation. Here on this screen, I've put a simple triangle shape. I'm now going to duplicate the slide and then resize the shape slightly. Now, if we didn't apply any transitions, we'd have a very jagged jump across the slides looking something like this. Watch what happens though when I apply the morph transition to slide number two. As you can see, the transition recognized the shape here on slide one is similar enough to that on slide two that it resized the shape automatically. You can also, however, adjust the shape's rotation or even its color. And morph will accommodate for these as well. I'll look at the slideshow from the beginning. And there you can see the transition. Now, what does this mean for educational slides? Well, let's take a look at a few examples. We'll start here in our food pyramid example and apply a transition between this slide which has our table cloth title slide and this one which uses an image of the adjusted table cloth as the background. We just apply the morph transition and voila, we get a nice easy glide between one slide and another. Now let's add this to the next slide. Notice that we've got the roll shape here which is echoed by these rolls shapes illustrating the number of servings. We just add the morph transition to slide number three and again we get a nice gradual glide. That's mostly aesthetic though. Let's see something with pedagogy. We'll scroll down a little bit here and let's say that we wanted to connect our food pyramid with the MyPlate Model which was recently introduced as an update to the food pyramid. Well, notice that we've got a lot of these icons here which are simply copied over from the icons here on the food pyramid. And when we add in the morph transition, watch what happens. That's more like it. Using this transition, it's very easy for students to make a visual connection between what happens in the pyramid model and what happens in the plate model. Now, I do have one other example that I'd like to show you to really see what morph can do. Here we have the Pythagorean Theorem, a mathematical classic. Now, on the next slide, we've got a triangle illustrating the concept. Notice that these three lines of the triangle are very similar to these three lines here on the title slide. The third slide introduces some text and an animated arrow that splits to illustrate opposite of the right angle and this arrow moves here in the next slide. There's no animations, it's simply been repositioned. We then end with a slide asking students to solve a problem illustrating the theorem. Now, these are fairly simple slides but as you can see, each of them has already been illustrated with the morph transition. Now, when you add the morph transition to all of these slides, let's see what happens. We start here in the opening slide with the three lines. Transition into slide number two, go slide number three which adds the line which then moves onto slide number four and finally, we get the problem on slide number five. Now, as you can see, morph in this context is not merely eye candy. It actually reinforces and makes more dynamic the concept of the Pythagorean Theorem itself. When used well, therefore, morph as a tool can substantially clarify your concepts in addition to making your slides more engaging.