One of the main advantages of using the PowerPoint Ribbon for working with class presentations is that it allows you to create and edit interactive slides for your presentation while still taking advantage of the full functionality of PowerPoint for the rest of the presentation.

You must sign in through the PowerPoint ribbon to make the Interactivity features available.

Limitation of Activity Slides in PowerPoint
The PowerPoint ribbon add-on provides an "interface" of sorts for generating Interactive Activities with PowerPoint itself, but these activities are an Echo360 feature, meaning PowerPoint doesn't have the facility to understand their purpose or present them as interactive slides.

To this end, you can view the activity slides in PowerPoint as they are created, but you must publish the presentation in order to show them as part of a slideshow. This allows Echo360 to receive the slides and process them, returning them to the PowerPoint viewer in their Interactive form.

To create an interactive activity slide

1. Open your PowerPoint presentation and click the Echo360 tab to Sign In to Echo360.
2. Navigate to the slide that will precede the activity slide (you can always move the slides around later if you need to).
3. Click New Activity from the Echo360 ribbon.
4. Select the type of activity slide you are creating from the drop-down list.
   
5. Complete the dialog box that appears, to create the type of activity selected.

Multiple Choice Activities

To create a multiple choice activity

1. Click New Activity from the Echo360 ribbon and select Multiple Choice from the drop-down list.
   The Create Multiple Choice Question dialog box appears.
   
2. Enter the Question Text for the activity. You can enter up to 500 characters.
3. Enable the Embed Media checkbox to add embedded URL content to the slide, then paste your link into the text box.
   Click the "learn more" link to open http://embed.ly/providers for a list of sites that support URL embedding.
   
4. In the Answers section of the dialog box, type the choices to be shown in the Answer field of each row. You can enter up to 200 characters for each answer.
5. Use the Correct checkboxes to identify the correct answer(s).
6. If desired, enable the Require a follow up short answer checkbox. This means that students will have to both answer the question then explain their answers in a text box provided on the slide.
   NOTE: Activities that require justifications cannot be answered by students via SMS (text).
7. When finished, click Submit.
   PowerPoint creates the activity slide and displays it for you.
   

Image Quiz Activities

To create an image activity

1. Click New Activity from theEcho360 ribbon and select Image Quiz from the drop-down list.
   The Create Image Question dialog box appears.
   
2. Enter the Question Text for the activity. You can enter up to 500 characters.
3. Use the Click to select image link (located below the Question Text field) to navigate to and select the image to use for the quiz.
   Once selected, the link changes to show the filename of the selected image.
4. On the image shown in the dialog box, click-and-drag your mouse to draw a box around the location of the correct answer. The box will appear as a yellow overlay.
   
5. If desired, enable the Require a follow up short answer checkbox. This means that students will have to both answer the question then explain their answers in a text box provided on the slide.
6. When finished, click Submit.
   PowerPoint creates the activity slide and displays it for you.
   

Short Answer (Free Response) Activities

To create a free response activity

1. Click New Activity from the Echo360 ribbon and select Free Response from the drop-down list.
   The Create Multiple Choice Question dialog box appears.
   
2. Enter the Question Text for the activity. You can enter up to 500 characters.
3. When finished, click Submit.
   PowerPoint creates the activity slide and displays it for you.
   

Media Slides

To create a media slide

1. Click New Activity from the Echo360 ribbon and select Media Slide from the drop-down list.
   The Create Media Slide dialog box appears.
   
2. Copy and paste the URL whose media you want to embed in the presentation into the Enter URL text box.
   If necessary, click the link in the dialog box to open http://embed.ly/providers, for a list of sites that support URL embedding.
3. Click Submit.
   PowerPoint creates the media slide and displays it for you.
   Note that you will see the URL and not the image. The embedded content is displayed after the presentation is published, and will appear when you show the slides.