After reviewing the videos and online material for creating interesting digital presentations, I learned that I have made numerous boring Power Point presentations throughout my educational career. In order to make useful digital presentations for my future students, I must completely change my thinking and methods for using Power Point and Keynote by keeping the following three tips in mind:
1. In order to keep students’ attention, the presentation must be visually interesting, not just text with bullet points and clipart. Creating a visually interesting presentation does not mean using pre-designed backgrounds on every slide and changing the font color. If all the slides look the same, then the students will not remember the information from the presentation. Different types of information can only be properly conveyed when transmitted through the best medium. Digital presentations work best for pictures, not text, graphs, or charts. Using pictures from every day life and the “real world” will make the presentation more relevant to the students’ lives, and therefore, easier to remember than clipart or stock textbook photos.
2. Do not include more information in the presentation than what the students need. Remove as much text as possible and focus on getting the main point across. Digital presentations are not good substitutes for handouts or books, so they should not look like a page from the textbook with numerous definitions and statistics.
3. Creating useful digital presentations for the classroom involves time and effort. The presentation will not be interesting or meaningful if the text came out of the textbook, every slide looks the same with a boring background, and it took ten minutes to create. Spend time to make the slides visually interesting with a focused point to convey to the students. It will take time to search for the best pictures to use or take digital pictures yourself.
I like the use of color to emphasize. Nice touch.