I just came across this video that I watched quite a while ago. It’s a humorous take on the very serious problem of PowerPoint misuse. I like it because, personally, I am so passionate about the need to rethink slides that I think others may be taken aback at first.
Humor helps people relax. They become less defensive and allow themselves to be a little more vulnerable. This, in turn, helps them to be more open to change.
Watch the video and see how easy it is to agree with Don.
According to Don McMillan, here is a humorous & yet insightful viewpoint on how people (teachers included) should not be using PowerPoint.
A while back I was asked to help a professor who was trying to play video in a presentation for a conference. While they were struggling to get the file to play – I fixed that in just a few minutes – I was worried that they were using a very small video on a larger slide. It just wasn’t going to look good.
For the best effect, videos should be played fullscreen. This can be done by simply scaling the video until it fills the entire slide, as you do with images.
Just like images, videos should have a resolution of at least 800×600. This isn’t always possible, since that resolution is set when the video is created. In this case, the videos were fairly small, but I came up with a trick to give the illusion of playing the video fullscreen.
I simply set the slide background to black and scaled the video as large as it would go without becoming to pixelated.
The perfect solution would be to reformat the video from the original source to match the screen resolution for the presentation. This usually isn’t possible since most teachers don’t shoot their own video. However, redesigning the slide is another great alternative.
It’s not often that you get to see a presentation and think, “Wow.” I’m not talking about the “whoa dude! That was so awesome!” kind of reaction. What I’m talking about is when you know that the message you just heard was exactly what the presenter meant for you to hear, and that the whole experience was simple and clear.
I recently had this experience watching the keynote at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.
Go ahead, chuckle, snort, you can even post a snarky comment about me being an Apple fanboy. It’s alright. Because it’s true. I love Apple and everything they stand for. I’m not saying that they are a perfect organization or that this presentation didn’t have any flaws (in fact, there were two obvious errors in this keynote). It’s just that their simple, direct approach to business, product design, marketing – and presenting – make it so that little, if anything, is misunderstood.
Go ahead and watch just a little bit of it.
Notice how there is rarely any text on the screen.
Beautiful, high quality images are used in place of bullet points.
Simple, easy to read graphs.
Transitions are used appropriately to create emphasis.
Not to mention a clutter free stage, large projector screen, the use of light humor, repetition, seamless transitions between speakers, and more.
Seriously, just watch a bit if you have some time.
The article, and the research done by State University of New York, focus on whether using podcasts as an extra study resource for students can improve grades. I am a huge fan of podcasts. Over the past couple of years I have learned an immense amount by listening to podcasts – from language, to photography, to brain science, and design. On iTunes U anyone can access lectures from some of the best universities in the country by downloading and listening to podcasts of each lecture. This is a great way to acquire knowledge or to get further study for a class you’re currently taking.
What I found even more interesting about this study was the method of teaching and study that wasn’t as effective: handing out printed copies of the lecture slides to students. As the author of the article notes, passing out PowerPoint handouts has become “all the rage” in many lecture halls, within or outside the academic world. In fact, two of my previous science courses are designed around PowerPoint handouts – every slide of every lecture for the entire semester is included in a “Lecture Guide” that the students purchase at the beginning of the semester (sometimes in lieu of a textbook).
What’s the problem with this?
PowerPoint slides are NOT notes. They should not function as notes. Not for the teacher and especially not for the student. Retention increases when exposure to information occurs across multiple modalities – listening to a lecture, reading a textbook, discussing a subject in a study group, etc. (You may be familiar with the idea of being a visual vs. kinisthetic vs. auditory learner.)
A printout of common lecture slides is not much different than the lecture – except that you probably aren’t having them read to you by a Ph.D.
But repitition increases recall, right?
Yes, that is true, but do not forget that certain modalities of learning are less effective than others. As Dr. John Medina points out, “the brain sees words as tiny pictures. Reading creates a bottleneck.” (Brain Rules, pg. 234)
This is just one more reason to do away with text on those lecture slides, replace them with images, and maybe even replace the handouts with a link to the podcast version of your next lecture.
This is a follow up to my previous post on using Full Screen Images in your presentations. I mentioned how important it is to use images that are at least 800 x 600 pixels. Most people tend to grab images that look grainy and pixelated.
In this video, I will show you how to use Google Image Search to limit your image search to high quality images. As mentioned in the video, I do not recommend using Google to find your images since you will likely run into copyright issues. However, it is very probable that you will continue to use images from the web when time, budget, or other constraints prevent you from using license-free stock images, so why not learn how to make small improvements.
