Over the past year, students and staff have had to adapt quickly to figure out how to deliver presentations virtually that would usually have been delivered face-to-face. Early on, the Liaison Librarians began to experiment with Sway, which is available to all members of the University as part of Microsoft Office. We have found it to be a flexible tool, which has solved the problem of not being able to go to lecture theatres and classrooms to deliver our inductions and workshops.
PowerPoint is many peoples’ go-to for presenting and it remains a good way to show content when there is a presenter, but Sway really comes into its own when you want to create self-paced presentations and tutorials. Whether you are working on a presentation for teaching, or for individual or group-based assessment, we hope that our three top tips will encourage you to innovate with Sway.
Sway is ideal for collaborative work. You can quickly duplicate sections created by others or repurpose your own work in a different way. As a student you can use it to create eye-catching group project work presentations that you can then easily share with your tutors or peers. Multiple people can simultaneously edit a single Sway and for the Liaison Librarian team it has been a great way for us to co-create and work together.
Accessible design means better design for everyone. Sway has inbuilt accessibility features which help you to navigate content more easily. Pictures and section headings are automatically combined to create a table of contents, so you can switch between different sections and get to the content you need quickly. Closed captions to accompany video content are quick and easy to upload. When viewing a Sway you can turn on Accessibility view to display a high-contrast style for easier reading, disable animations, and support keyboard navigation for use with screen readers. The Accessibility Checker gives prompts for inclusive design.
Sway is incredibly versatile – allowing you to alternate between use of text, images and videos with ease. This variety means you can avoid inundating your reader/viewer with too much information at once. Sway allows you to separate your content into logical, distinct sections, so instead of having one long piece of text, or one 50-minute video that covers multiple points, you can present smaller, manageable sections in different formats, sequenced in a meaningful way. This is great for people engaging with your material as it means they can access and reflect on the section they need with ease, rather than having to sift through or haphazardly fast-forward to find the bit they are interested in. All sections can then be dragged and dropped to help you reorganise your content to suit different contexts.
And on top of all of this, you can carry on editing your Sway even after you have shared the link – perfect for last minute changes. The Sway analytics also let you keep on top of views and engagement. For inspiration here is a Sway created by the Liaison Librarians for Welcome Week that you may have seen before: Welcome to your Library.
The Liaison Librarians’ combined welcome and induction Sways have had over 8 thousand views and we are using it in a wide range of asynchronous teaching. We love how versatile and interactive Sway can be and would really recommend giving it a go.
If you haven’t already seen a library Sway created for your module or would just like to know more, then get in touch with your Liaison Librarian.
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