Whenever I think about PowerPoint presentations, I am brought back to my undergraduate days and my Economics professor who read text directly from the slide and coincidentally the text was directly from the book. The tedium of lecture is credited with me becoming the master of Bejeweled.
As an educator, it is important to know that you have to capture your audience early or they will be lost from the beginning.
3 Important Things to Remember….
1). Powerpoint point is being abused. I think that Dan Meyer’s presentation on giving a presentation is dead-on. Most people who use Powerpoint or Keynote are guilty of being completely dependent instead of using it as the crutch that it should be. Overly-wordy slides and graphs are generally pointless and are passed over by students. Pictures are better and as the teacher you can used the picture as a start to an anecdote or a writing prompt for students.
2) “10-20-30″- “It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. ” Words to live by in my experience with Powerpoint. An audience, both young and old, will lose interest if there are many more slides than that. Following that rule will insure that you are only supplying students with the most important information and leaving out the fluff.
3). Avoid the “Cold Open”. Diving into any topic is always tough but just like in lesson planning, in a presentation, you need a “hook”. As someone with the attention span of a gnat, I understand that if I do not grab the audience in the beginning, I will never get them back. Relating the topic to your students is key at any age in school. If there is a way to relate something to your student, that can take the most boring of subjects and make them exciting and memorable.