Mouse Mischief - free software for teachers in February

Some Free February Appy-ness with a new piece of free software for teachers from Microsoft every day in February. Many of these items are unknown heroes, but they all share two things in common: 1) They are useful for teachers or students and 2) they are free.

Mouse Mischief

A simple idea: Let your students interact with your PowerPoint presentation, and use that to be able to draw them deeper into their learning, and for testing their understanding of it.

Mouse Mischief integrates into Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, letting you insert questions, polls, and drawing activity slides into your lessons. Students can actively participate in these lessons by using their own mice to click, circle, cross out, or draw answers on the screen.

Three reasons to use Mouse Mischief in your classroom

• Actively engaging students and supporting collaborative learning
  With Mouse Mischief you can spark student curiosity by incorporating interactive technology into the curriculum. Students have fun learning while seeing visual representations of their answers on a shared screen while using colourful mouse pointers (like a robot, snowflake, guitar, and many more shapes). You can enable collaborative learning when using Mouse Mischief in Team mode; in Team mode, all members of a team need to work together to agree on an answer before it can be selected.

• Improving classroom management and overall student participation
  With Mouse Mischief you no longer need to wait for raised hands; you can immediately see your students' answers on the screen. Mouse Mischief helps make it easy for all students even those who are often quiet in class to participate regularly without the fear of saying the wrong answer. This can allow you to have better visibility into the progress and comprehension of your entire class so you can adjust your lessons on the spot.

  
  

• It’s familiar to use and easy on the classroom budget
  Because Mouse Mischief integrates into familiar PowerPoint technology, you do not have to spend time learning new skills to use it. Additionally, you can set up your classrooms to play Mouse Mischief lessons without purchasing expensive hardware; many schools already have mice, and both mice and USB hubs are available at many stores where computer accessories are sold.

Where can I find out how to use it?

From the Mouse Mischief website, there are a ton of helpful links to use. There’s a video guide to setting up and using Mouse Mischief, along with videos for using the student participation features, and for creating multiple choice and Yes/No question slides. If you prefer to read documents, then there’s the Quick Start Guide.

Once you’ve got the basics, it’s worth looking at all of the Mouse Mischief lesson templates, to see if there’s something there that will get you started.

There are also Mouse Mischief articles on the Microsoft Knowledge Base

Where do I get Mouse Mischief from?

It’s best to download from the link on the Mouse Mischief website, but if you want one less click, then download it directly here.