Peer-publishing interactive on-screen texts provides a challenging, creative and motivating project for upper primary and lower secondary pupils, allowing them to make digital books for their peers or children in other classes, and offering many creative opportunities to draw on content from across the curriculum. Adventure stories, reference texts, even spelling investigations lend themselves to interactive interpretation through PowerPoint. Hyperlinks, animations, sound effects, digital images and slide transitions can all lead to a more enriching and engaging reading experience for pupils, and such texts have been very successfully created for use with children in younger year groups.

• To explore the functions of PowerPoint that allow the creation of interactive texts
• To provide a supported opportunity to begin to create interactive texts as a basis for future classroom activities

• Supported exploration of PowerPoint features, including: customising the appearance of slides; insertion of pictures, animations and sound; use of hyperlinks to create non-linear texts; customising the animation of slide contents; customising slide transition features
• Exploration of sample non-linear texts and interactive activities
• Exploration of ways to develop non-linear texts and interactive activities with children
• Consideration of navigation issues for authors and readers of non-linear texts
• Opportunities to create short texts/activities which incorporate the features explored during the course

N.B. Participants will gain more from the day if they have had an introduction to PowerPoint prior to the course.