Annotation with PowerPoint

An article by Darin Wagner

“I want students to mark up grammatically incorrect sentences on my interactive white board. What’s the easiest way to do that?”

My answer was “PowerPoint.” When you use Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to display presentations, or in this case sentences, you can annotate right on the slide. This option appealed to me because we did not have to launch the board’s software to annotate on the slide. We could accomplish the same task within just one application and not have to flip back and forth.

To write on your slides during your slide show, either right-click on the slide and select Pointer Options, or mouse over the lower-left corner of the slide to view the presenter options (arrows to navigate forward and back, the slide navigation menu, and the annotation tool).

In either case, you will be presented with the option of selecting a ballpoint pen, a felt tip pen or highlighter. The ballpoint pen draws a thin line, the felt tip pen’s line is thicker, and the highlighter does what it describes with the widest line.

Now that you have an annotation tool selected, simply hold down the left mouse button and drag to circle, underline, draw arrows, or make other marks on the slides to emphasize a point or show connections.

Here is an example of a slide that was annotated using the built-in tools. In this case, capitalization was missed at the beginning of the sentence, as well as a period at the end.