PowerPoint articles OneNote articles   Recommended Links, Newsgroups, and Newsletters   Get Help directly from Kathy	Web www.onppt.com   Turning Point 2006: A good tool turns the corner to great! For the last few months, I have had the joy of playing around with Turning Technologies’ Turning Point 2006 software. I had used previous versions of the toolset, but this new version is so much better than even I expected that I wanted to let you know all about it. (FYI: All testing for this review was done using PowerPoint 2003.) One of the best parts of Turning Point has always been its integration with PowerPoint. The toolset has always let you add slides from within PowerPoint, work with your responders lists from within PowerPoint, and seamlessly work with the reports in Excel. One of the problems that I had with the tool in the past is that once you installed Turning Point, it was always there when you used PowerPoint. That problem no longer exists. While the tool is still tightly tied to PowerPoint, you now start Turning Point from outside of PowerPoint and then it starts PowerPoint. This means that when you need the audience response tools, you have them. When you are working with presentations that don’t have audience response mechanisms, you start PowerPoint by itself and Turning Point is out of the picture. Design work, presentation organization, and other PowerPoint specific tasks can be done without the extra toolbars and information from Turning Point. When you are ready to integrate the audience response information into your presentations, you can do that quickly and easily. Which brings us to the next thing I love about the new Turning Point: The new slides and feedback tools! Turning Point has always had a variety of slide types for gathering audience information. With this version, the tool has been expanded to have even more slide types. There are now over 20 different types of polling slides you can add. These allow you to create the question and response slides, as well as define how the responses will be shown. The basic response slide types include: A variety of graph based response slides Leader board slides Opinion slides, ranging from simple yes/no slides to Likert scale slides Ice breaker slides Fill in the blank and essay slides Moment to Moment slides In addition, there are a series of slide types that you can use to ensure that the response cards are working, that the audience is grouped into teams, and that show the current leaders in response time and correct responses. While I like the variety of slides and find the options much better than anything else I have worked with, I still find the animation and entrance capabilities of the charts to be somewhat limited. I would really like, for example, to have the option to have the bar chart grow from the right edge of the slide instead of the left edge of the slide. If this is possible with the current version, I haven’t figured it out yet. Another big plus to Turning Point has also been the slide extras that come with the program. Here again, Turning Point 2006 blew me away. This version has even more informational triggers for your audience, such as: Timers for limiting audience response time Counters for showing how many responses have been collected Correct answer indicators Answer now indicators You can also add statistical information on the responses given so that responders can see how their answer compared with the mean, medium, etc. answers from this session. Once you have added all of the elements to your slides, you are can move them around on the slide, change how they look, or how they animate, just as you have always been able to. If you have preset color schemes with the presentation you are using, Turning Point still gets the color schemes right, so your slide elements actually look like they go with your presentation slides, rather than just something you added on later. You can change the look of any of the added elements through the regular PowerPoint interface. (Sounds like this is a no-brainer, right? Not with some audience response systems. Since Turning Point uses autoshapes and PowerPoint slide elements to generate your objects, you can work with them. Some of the response systems out there use graphics that can not be changed –you can tell which slides were created in PowerPoint and which weren’t.) Another big improvement on the creation side is the ability to create conditional paths through your presentation based on the responses you receive. By setting up the conditional paths, you can target which questions you ask the audience based on the information your audience provides during the session. I will warn you, though, there is a somewhat steep learning curve involved in using the conditional formatting. Don’t try it the day before your presentation. Ok, so using the tool to create presentations has been made easier… How about participant tracking? The participant features are easy to use and just as integrated as the slide creation tools. You can import participant lists as desired, you can set up teams directly from the interface, and you can assign keypads before the session starts. Really nice, huh? Turning Technologies has taken things a few steps further. You can use their wizards to set up your participant lists, or you can import your participant lists from other sessions. Once you have imported the lists, you can use the lists as they are, edit them to target the list to your current session, or group them in any way you desire. If you run sessions with the same number of participants but not the same names time after time, you can set up a participant list before the first session, then edit the list to change the participant name from class to class. On the other hand, if you are running a semester course where you always know the students names, you can re-use the exact participant list time after time, but shuffle the groups with very little effort on your part. Want to go one step even further? Use the wizard to set up a sample session, and then import the participant information directly from an Excel file. Voila – instant tracking from participant to response device to demographic data in one easy step. Want to test your presentations? Turning Point has always allowed you to test with simulated data, but this latest version seems better at generating the simulation data than previously. I have found that the test data is more robust and more varied than previously. Ok, so you have created your session data, you have created your presentation, you have linked up the two. Now for what you bought the tool to do: You are in front of a group and you want to run your presentation. This too has been made cleaner and clearer. The slide elements you added help your participants and you see how things are going. But even better than that, Turning Point talks to a very wide range of response pads. I tested with some basic number pads and loved the response time, the set up, and the interaction possibilities. Add the newer text based pads or the PDA apps that simulate a response pad. You will be amazed at the things your audience can tell you. Tip: With Turning Point, you can reset either the entire session or a single slide within the session. During testing this feature is invaluable. During a live session, this means that if you have to ask a question over, you can either save the data from each time you ask or from just the last time you ask. Don’t want to evaluate the data as it comes in? Don’t worry – Turning Point has you covered there too. All responses are saved with your session data. You can save the data to your disk at any time and evaluate it live or after the fact. The report generator takes the data you received from your presentation session and evaluates it for everything from correct/incorrect answers, to attendance session to session, to standards checking, to demographical information. Overall, I would say Turning Point 2006 is your best bet for an audience response system. Don’t believe me? Ok, then here is the real dealmaker: You can check it out for free from Turning Technologies just by downloading the tool. The download is free and lets you generate presentations all you want. You can run those presentations with the simulated data to see how things are will run (either with random participant information or with your own generated participant information). If you want to do a full demo with actual keypads, contact them for a demo. Or, check them out at any of a number of trade shows… I know for a fact they will be at PPT Live, so come see them there! (Want to learn Turning Point? Watch this site… I am developing a series of tutorials to show you just how easy it is to create your Turning Point presentations!)