Making Videos with Power Point and Office Mix

When I bought my new laptop, I also bought the new Office.  It turns out that Power Point 2015 can be used with Office Mix, which is a free download.  It makes it easy to turn Power Point slides into a video.  I did just that and made a video introduction to the idea of the flipped classroom.  Here's what I did:

1. I created a Power Point slide show that described how a flipped classroom works and the advantages of the flipped classroom for students.
2. I created a set of questions for students to answer in response to the video.
3. I decided on a format for the video.  My daughter and I would engage in a question-and-answer format, and I wrote the questions I thought my video should answer.
4. Office Mix lets you record video and audio right in the Power Point program.  My daughter and I used it to record our question-and-answer session.  Note: You don't record the whole video at once.  You record it one slide at a time.
5. I was able to export it to MP4 format with a couple of clicks.  During the video export process, the slide show is turned into a video.  That is, it turns the slideshow into a continuous video that plays the video or audio clip on each slide before automatically moving on to the next slide.

Some observations:

• I like that the environment is so familiar.  Office Mix may be new, but Power Point is certainly not.  I enjoyed making the slideshow, which also served as my outline while I recorded the video or audio for each slide.
• I like that the Office Mix buttons are so easy to use.  I am not a professional videographer, and I don't need to be one with this add-in.
• I like that you can screencast with this add-in.  I included a screen capture of one of my documents in the Power Point, and I was able to draw on it while I was recording the audio for this slide.  I plan to make use of this feature often in the future.
• I think it's great that I can choose whether to include video, audio, or neither on a slide-by-slide basis, rather than forcing me to choose one for the whole slideshow.
• I was somewhat dismayed by the fact that you can't edit the video or audio once it's made, but that didn't bother me much.  In actuality, you're recording the video or audio for one slide at a time, which makes them small clips (usually less than a minute each).  It is very little trouble to redo them.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the ease of the recording and publishing experience, and I am quite happy with the product.  This is what I will use to record all of my videos.