Tuesday 27 November 2012

Oh, Powerpoint

I really enjoy powerpoint presentations. Througout highschool I used them often, and I think I am pretty savy with using it. embedding videos, creating really interesting layouts, inserting voice overlays; the program allows for a lot of different and interesting creations to be developed from it. Yet people still make so many boring, and ugly presentations.
A few of the common mistakes that happen during powerpoints are:
way too many transitions
bad text: font, color, and size
animations that often look immature
bad sound effects (good only if you are actually trying to be funny)
too much text on the slide
no pictures or too many pictures
.....so much more than can't be listed at this time.
I really love the features that powerpoint can offer, but people really need to remember that the powerpoint is just an aid to their presentation, not the other way around. Ok, now that I have had my rant, how do I teach students to use powerpoint properly? Presentations are scary for students, and having an aid like powerpoint can really help them to feel more confident in their presentations. Of course they will run into the giltches at first that I just mentionned, that is part of the learning process. How do you get students past the point of the boring ugly powerpoint presentation? How do you get students to use the powerpoint as a creative outlet during learning and build a strong presentation at the same time? A few thoughts to ponder....

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