Microsoft Sway

Sway for Teaching

Microsoft describes Sway as a 'mobile, adaptive digital storytelling tool that lets students and teachers focus on content over format'. It makes it very quick and easy to create interactive presentations which can be used to present in seminars and lectures, embedded in Moodle or shared with students by sharing a URL. It means that you can spend less time on designing presentations, and more time thinking about the content you want to put in the presentation.

Students can also use Sway to create presentations and by using this tool yourself, you can share its benefits with students who might not be aware that it is available to them. You can create templates in Sway to share with students, duplicated and used for assignments. Up to 10 people can edit a Sway simultaneously so this tool can also be used in or out of teaching time to set up collaborative projects. 

Office 365 gives us access to premium Sway features enabling us to create Sways with more content and allowing us to share within the organisation more easily. Sway has an inbuilt accessibility checker and viewers can also select an accessible view option.  

This course provides an excellent introduction to Microsoft Sway, covering the basics from setting up presentations, to looking at some of the more advanced features. It works through a number of examples of ways that Sway might be used, including student presentation of research, creating online content which might be used in a flipped learning approach.

Watch the video to the right to see how easy it is to create a Sway presentation either from scratch or using a template.