Many instructors ask why we don't have PowerPoint slides, often noting that many textbooks come with slides. There are a couple reasons:
- A zyBook is already electronic so can itself be projected, which many instructors do. Textbook slides were needed partly because instructors wanted to project a book's figures but hardcopy books can't be projected, and even when textbooks became available digitally, their formatting for paper made projecting awkward. In contrast, zyBooks are formatted for the web so project nicely. Instructors can also play the animations, which form a key part of zyBooks and would be hard to reproduce in PowerPoint. Instructors can also work on Challenge Activities or zyLabs while projecting as well.
- zyBooks are updated frequently, more akin to "cloud software" than to "textbook editions". Textbook editions come out every few years, so updating a set of ppt slides every few years is feasible. But zyBooks don't have editions; they have major updates every 6 months or year, plus they have minor updates dozens of times throughout the year. Trying to keep a parallel set of slides in synch would be hard.
- zyBooks are configurable, and can be combined with other zyBooks, so slides would have to somehow need to match an instructor's particular combo and configuration.
If one does not want to project the zyBook in its normal form, a zyBook can be put into "Presentation view" (via a button on the top of each page). Paragraphs and questions sets are automatically removed, leaving animations, figures, tables, coding windows, etc. All defined terms are automatically made into large bulleted text, like on a traditional slide. See below for an example.
A drawback of our approach is that internet access is required, vs. ppt slides that can be used without internet. An instructor who wishes to project content without internet can previously save our content by using their browser’s “Save page as –> Webpage complete” for each section. Alternatively, they can print a chapter to pdf. While the saved content won’t be interactive, the content can be projected, at least to help get the instructor through the internet outage.
Learn to use presentation view from this article.
Normal view:
Presentation view (achieved by clicking the "Present" button on the upper right):
