The Microsoft PowerPoint team recently announced that Office Mix will now integrate with all major Learning Management Systems through the LTI standard.
Office Mix is a free add-in for PowerPoint that makes it easy to author and share interactive online lessons. Educators can easily add audio and video narration, real-time inking, screen recordings, quizzes and polls within PowerPoint. Lessons can be viewed in practically any browser on any device. Through support of LTI, we have made it easy for educators to embed mixes into all major Learning Management Systems (LMSs), including Canvas, Engrade, Blackboard, Haiku, Moodle, Brightspace, EDUonGo and Schoology. Additionally, the LTI adoption enables McGraw-Hill Education (MHE) to utilize Office Mix to provide a custom teaching experience for adopters of the next generation of MHE products. Cengage Learning will be releasing an Introductory Computing MindTap pilot integrating Office Mix for fall 2015 classes. After Office Mix has been set up to work with an LMS via LTI, educators can easily embed interactive mixes, created by themselves or the community, within their LMS as assignments or assessments. LTI also seamlessly authenticates students, and their grades are automatically passed back to the LMS grade book.
As a Moodle administrator, teacher, and end user this announcement is exciting on many levels. As we have talked about this before on the blog, teacher voice in a blended or online course is extremely important. Office Mix makes screen casting dead simple and now it is easier then ever to take Mix lessons and integrate them into my Moodle courses. As a Moodle admin, the LTI setup takes about 5 min and your entire teaching staff can take advantage of integrating Mix lessons into their courses.
Admins:
Go to https://mix.office.com/ and press the login button:
Login. I am very appreciative that Microsoft is supporting many account logins. As a school that uses Google Apps for Education, it is a welcome addition to use my GAFE account to access Mix.
Once you have logged in, navigate to https://mix.office.com/lti and manage your connections:
Click Register a New LMS to create an LTI key and passcode to enter into your LMS at the site level. This will very depending on LMS. Microsoft has a help document to assist.
That is the process for the Site Administrator, now on to the teacher…
Teacher
Once your site administrator has the LTI connection built at the site level all the teacher needs to do is create a Office Mix presentation and upload the finished presentation to Office Mix online. If you are new to Office Mix check out this getting started guide. Once your Mix presentation is uploaded to Office Mix Online, click on the presentation to grab the URL of the Mix:
The next step will vary depending on your LMS. This example is using Moodle. In Moodle, the LTI assignment is called an “external tool”. In the external tool you add the URL of the Office Mix presentation and choose the External Tool type (which was created by the system admin)
Now your Office Mix presentation will be built into your LMS as shown below:
Are you going to use Office Mix LTI integration? If so add your example in the comment section below. If you are using a different LMS, add the directions below to help others integrate this great product!
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