There are times during a lecture when you really want the undivided attention of your students. Maybe you’re about to reveal some important information about the upcoming exam, or a change in the homework assignment, for instance. Or, as Brant Choate at GYJoe.com suggests, you may want the students to participate in a classroom discussion. But you may have noticed as he has, that “when slides are being shown, there is a subtle but powerful emotional response that will prohibit students from wanting to participate” or pay attention.

This coincides nicely with the Brain Rule on Attention – “We don’t pay attention to boring things.” Our brains can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and it usually chooses to pay attention to the thing that is more interesting. I think you can agree that anything is more interesting than a blank, black screen.

A blank slide like this one can pull students' attention away from the slides to focus on you.

A simple trick in PowerPoint or Keynote can help refocus your students’ attention on you – turning off the slides. Yep, that’s it. If you want students to pay attention to YOU, force them to stop paying attention to YOUR SLIDES, just by turning them off. This doesn’t mean you have to exit the program or shut down the projector, though. Here are 2 quick and easy ways to blank the screen during your lecture.

The ‘B’ Key

In both PowerPoint and Keynote, pressing the ‘B’ key on your keyboard will make the screen go black. (Alternatively, the ‘W’ key in either application makes the screen completely white.) To return to your slides, press any key. Many presenter remotes (such as the Targus Presentation Remote) have a dedicated button to blank the screen, allowing you to blank the screen without having to be stuck at your computer behind the lectern.

Insert Black Slide

If you are preparing a lecture ahead of time and anticipate a moment that requires the students’ attention, insert a blank, black slide. (To be clear, any layout will appear blank when presented, unless you have inserted text or other objects onto the slide. I prefer to explicitly choose the Blank layout to avoid any confusion while creating the slide deck.)

To do this in Keynote:

1. Insert a new slide.
2. Change the Slide Layout to Blank Slide.
3. Change the Theme to Black.

To do this in PowerPoint:

1. Insert a new slide.
2. Change the Slide Layout to Blank
3. Change the Slide Background to Black and be sure ‘Hide Background Graphics’ is checked.

Yesterday, Apple released the iPad, “A Magical and Revolutionary Product at an Unbelievable Price.” It was an instant hit, selling an estimated 600,000 – 700,000 in the first day.

As a true Apple fan, I spent a few hours playing with the iPad, on the day of its release, wondering what it could mean for the future of presentations in the classroom. Let me tell you that I am very excited.

Some people have criticized it as nothing more than a large iPod Touch. Frankly, they’re not far off, and that is precisely why I am so excited. The iPhone/iPod Touch interface is very intuitive and natural to use. Because there is no mouse – you just use your finger – the learning curve is flattened out.

So why not just use an iPod Touch? There are two things that make the iPad different. First, it has more power. The iPad is more responsive and capable of running programs that require a lot of processing power. Second, the iPad has a 9″ screen, and it is beautiful. It really becomes a window to another world.

Ok, so it’s a fancy new gadget. So what? I’m glad you asked, because there’s no point in getting excited over something new unless it has real, practical value. While I believe the iPad will make a huge impact in the education system, it probably don’t have to go out and grab one just yet. Start saving your pennies, finish this semester, and put together a proposal for your school’s IT department to convince them to get you one for the next school year. In the meantime, here are some things to start thinking about.

Students

The iPad will be the perfect student companion. While the on-screen keyboard will take getting used to, third party products can turn the iPad into a very useable digital notebook. Combine the Pogo Sketch Stylus with an app such as Mental Note and a student can type, draw, sketch, or write their notes on the iPad while recording audio from the lecture.

Textbooks

Apple provides a free app called iBookstore for the iPad which allows you to search and download electronic books much like on Amazon’s Kindle. However, instead of grayscale text, you get beautifully formatted, multimedia enhanced, full color books. Major textbook publishers have already announced plans to release their titles on the iPad. No more 20 pound backpacks for 80 pound 6th graders!

Teachers

With it’s iPod app for music and video, as well as the built in YouTube app, the iPad could be the single device to organize all of the multimedia content a teacher could want. Record a podcast for the kids to listen to at the beginning of class, download the most recent NOVA Science video podcast, watch a chemistry experiment blow up on YouTube, or play classical music during free reading time. Have a full screen seating chart with pictures and tap on each student that is absent. At a starting price of $499, it wouldn’t be surprising to see iPads replace the full desktop in each classroom. And at 1.5 lbs, most teachers wouldn’t hesitate to bring work home with them.

Presentations

While I comment on all aspects of education, this site is really about creating great presentations in the classroom, and the iPad will be a fabulous tool in that regard. Beyond the multimedia options I have already mentioned, Apple has released a version of Keynote designed specifically for the iPad. In addition, you can purchase a VGA connector to use the iPad with a projector. The device will change to a presenter display and show the presentation on the screen. While Microsoft has no plans to create a version of Office for the iPad, Keynote will open PowerPoint documents that have been e-mailed to the device.

New to the touch version of Keynote are on screen presenter tools. With a simple swipe from the left of the screen you can pull up all of the slides in the presentation and jump forward or back. Watch the first minute of this video of a hands-on demo to see it in action.

(Update: As you can see in the video, the demo shows an on screen drawing feature which allows you to annotate your slides much like on a white board or as sports commentators do. This feature is not functional on release versions of the iPad.)

Creating presentations on the iPad is a breeze and a delight. You can move objects just by touching them and add smooth transitions with ease. Typing isn’t too difficult, but that doesn’t matter because you use very little text anyway. Photos can be imported from your iPhoto library or saved to the device via e-mail.

To learn more about iPad, visit Apple’s website and watch these Guided Tours.

YouTube – How NOT to use PowerPoint!

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.

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