Everyone has heard the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Turns out, it’s true. Written language has evolved over the years from cave drawings and paintings. Indeed, text is nothing more than a series of very simple pictures. For this reason, the brain takes considerably longer to decode strings of text (i.e. bulleted sentences) than it does single words or short statements. In other words, pictures are faster at conveying information than words – at least when we’re talking about concepts and ideas (detailed data is difficult to convey via words or pictures – which is why scientific papers turn to tables and charts).
Here are two steps you can take to use less text.
1. Whittle your titles. Take the time to reduce slide titles down to their core meaning. This will remove clutter and superfluous information that can confuse and distract your students. Use short, concise titles to get the main point across. Then fill in the gaps while lecturing. This allows the student to understand the context which aids in better retention of the details you provide.
Oftentimes, I find a lot of redundancy in slide titles throughout a lecture. For instance, “Using Peer Mentors to Drive Students Toward Deeper Learning and Productive Reflective Writing” could become “Peer Mentors Improve Learning.”
“What Do Professional Learning Communities Have to Do With Factoring A Trinomial?” could become “Math and Society” or “The Role of Math in Society.”
“A History of the Culture of Tea in Britain” might be simplified as “British Tea Culture.”
2. Remove bulleted text. Bullets on a slide often serve only as lecture notes to prompt the professor and are not necessary for the students. Sure, they need to know the information, but you’re going to explain the important concepts during the lecture. If you need those notes while you’re presenting, cut and paste them into the Presenter Notes in your slideware. You can then print off the slides as lecture notes or use Presenter Mode while in class. Remember, guns don’t kill people, bullets kill people.
After my previous post, I thought I would quickly share how I used Flickr’s CreativeCommons section to find high quality images to use in presentations.
Did you know you can find free, high-quality images that have been licensed for re-use? I will explain how to search for them at Flickr.com and use them in your presentation.
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.
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.
When you use images in your presentation you can make them have more impact by doing one simple thing: fill the screen with the image. In the printing business this is called full bleed.
You’ve more than likely come across a book, magazine, or pamphlet that has a full bleed image. The great thing about full bleed images is that, rather than feeling like you are looking at a picture, you almost feel like you are in the image itself. That is because all distractions are removed by printing the image all the way to the edge of the page.
To make a slide have more impact and to avoid distracting elements, scale it up to fit the entire slide (or even larger if you want to focus on a certain element). Do not leave any portion of the background showing. Take a look at the following examples:
In the original, I simply placed the image in the slide as the template suggested. It’s fine, really, until you see the second option. Here I filled the entire slide with the image. This changes the viewer’s perspective from looking at a picture to actually being in the picture. Also, it actually made more room to place the text – right on top of the image.
Troubleshooting
Now, I will let you know right up front that you will run into two problems with this approach.
First, you may want to use an image that is in portrait orientation rather than landscape (meaning it is taller than it is wide). If you were to fill the slide with an image like this you would have to crop it and most likely lose nearly half of the image.
The solution is simple. Use a plain black background and fill the slide vertically while leaving margins on the side. When the image is projected on the screen, those dark margins will simply disappear because they blend in with the rest of the unused projector screen. Softening the edges of the picture will remove any sharp lines and help the photo to blend in even more.
Second, after you scale the images to fill the slide, they may become distorted or “pixelated”. If this happens, the image you are using does not have high enough resolution. Most projectors have a screen resolution of 800×600 pixels. (Newer models have 1024×768 or even higher if it is a widescreen projector.) In fact, 800×600 is the default resolution of new presentations in most software. If your image has a lower resolution and you stretch it to fill the screen, some detail will be lost.
So be sure the images you use have a resolution of at least 800×600 pixels in order to fill the screen and maintain full quality.
In a future post I will explain how to determine the resolution of an image and even how to quickly find a suitable image on Google or Flickr.
