Plan B – Multiple Digital Formats

An article by Darin Wagner    No Comments

My lesson today focused on how history and outside influences have affected the Middle East. The focus was the modernization of three nations – Egypt, Turkey and Iran. In advance I created a presentation in PowerPoint that summarized the main ideas in the text. Finally, I wanted the students to reflect on the content and given a series of self-questioning stems, generate one question that they still needed answered based on the content.

We were ready to begin when I learned that we needed to go to the Library to access computers. As we logged in and went to my Moodle site for the presentation file, I realized that I had saved it as a .pptx. Why was this important? Because the students were working on Macs with old Office software. They were not going to be able to open the file. I quickly opened the original on my PC and saved it again in .ppt format, uploaded the other version, and a little later, the students could access, download, open, and work with my file.

Lesson learned: Take a moment when saving a file in multiple formats for students to access. If I had just taken an extra two minutes the day before to save in both formats, I would have avoided unnecessary time off-task and the lesson would have been more successful.