Overview
When you first mention PowerPoint, the image that comes to mind for some is a darkened room with students dozing in the back while a professor reads slide after slide of text.
Like any piece of software, PowerPoint is not useful or ineffective in and of itself. It's effectiveness depends on how it is used and why.
Before you jump into creating a presentation, give some consideration to the questions raised in the following two sections:
Why use PowerPoint?
Consider the following benefits of well-designed presentation:
- Help your students focus. Used to support a lecture, PowerPoint can provide a visual outline of your content and help students focus their attention on what is being said.
- Make content visual.One of the best reasons to use PowerPoint is the ability it gives you to present content in a qualitatively different way through the use of graphics, charts, animation, and even videoor audio. Try to think of ways to present ideas visually to help students understand concepts. PowerPoint comes with a library of clip art, diagrams, and graphs, or you can insert other image files. Do you ever spend time in class diagramming complex processes on the chalkboard? You can create a simple �animation� by drawing each step in the process on a different slide, then moving from slide to slide with a transition applied.
- Manage your media.PowerPoint can also be used to manage or control a media-rich presentation that may be non-linear in nature. You can easily use PowerPoint to create links within a presentation or to other documents, to open applications, or to launch a browser and open a Web sites.
- Insert interactivity.To keep things interactive, intersperse some discussion questions or problems throughout the presentation.
- Provide targeted illustrations.There are also other ways to use PowerPoint besides presenting an entire lecture with it. You might consider creating short, animated presentations to illustrate specific topics or processes that are hard to explain. Short presentation can be used during a lab or other group work session if you notice a number of students are having difficulty understanding something. You might also add interactivity to a lecture session by presenting quiz questions in PowerPoint and animating the entry of answers.
How will the presentation be used?
Before creating a PowerPoint file, you should give some consideration to how it will be used. The following list describes some possible uses and the design implications of each:
- Preview of lecture. Some instructors who provide copies of PowerPoint slides to students before a lecture have found that students arrive better prepared and with an overview of what will be covered. If this is your goal, be sure your slides are in outline format so that you may add comments, illustrations, and examples when you present, rather than simply reading off of the slides. Otherwise, your students may wonder why they need to attend class, if the entire lecture is available verbatim on hand-outs.
- Printed for note taking. If you provide slides before a class meeting, some students will arrive with printouts to use for note-taking. Again, providing slides in outline format can help students focus their notetaking without giving them too much information.
- Projected in class for a presentation. If you're going to be presenting slides in a room, it's helpfull to know some things about the environment, like the size of the room and whether it will be dark or lit. See the pages on design tips and text tips for for suggestions on dealing with different situations.
- Out of class review. If you want to provide a way for students to review your presentation later or if they missed class, you may want to consider providing additional information as Notes. An outline presentation usually provides very limited value to someone who has not heard you fill in the details.
- Viewed on line. If you intend to deliver your presentation on a Web site, there are several decisions you need to make, such as whether or not to inlcude audio, which features of the presentation must be maintained (for example, animation), and what your students need to see. The section on distributing a presentation explains the benefits and limitations of different distribution options.
