To mark the movement of the School of Education to the Faculty of Arts, Professional & Social Studies (APSS) this blog post highlights the practice of Sarah Tickle from the School of Justice Studies and her use of Microsoft Sway, an innovative online software tool, enabling students to showcase their work in a visual way.

So what is Sway?

Sway is a Microsoft product that is freely available and in particular students and staff can access it via their LJMU login. Think of it as PowerPoint meets Publisher meets web page. It is a very versatile product which allows presentation mode or web page mode. It is simple to provide the students with a template to provide scaffolding for the task. Students could if they prefer produce the majority of their writing in word and then upload it into Sway to experiment with the visual effects.

The variety of available styles means that the students are able to produce submissions that look quite different visually but include all the required academic input.

An example of the template in Sway can be seen in Figure 1. The text is typed into the boxes, the images or videos chosen to accompany the text, add captions if desired and then Sway does all the work of turning it into a web page or a presentation (you can toggle between them both).

The template can either be produced in Sway or in Word. An example of the Word template used by Sarah is shown in Figure 2 below:

Once the student has completed the task:

• the Sway web address can be shared with the tutor at any time (or e.g. with other students)
• the Sway can be exported as a word or pdf document
• the Sway address can be submitted as an assignment to speedgrader in Canvas (an image of the web page at the time of submission is captured and shown in the speedgrader window together with a link to the active sway)
• or if you wish to run the students work through turnitin there are various options for achieving this by using an export combined with the web address

Figure 3 below shows a further example of students work also produced from the same initial template. The style is very different from the example in Figure 1:

Using Sway as a tutor

If you produce a sway yourself it can be embedded into Canvas. This would be particularly useful as it is possible to update the Sway and the embedded version will automatically update, saving time and keeping consistency where you have the same page in multiple locations, all will update as they are looking at the same source. It would be important to share the sway page with your colleagues on these courses so that the necessary people have editing rights as they would have in Canvas directly.