foolfillment: the blog

Tomorrow night I’m giving the first of three sessions on Advanced PowerPoint. I’m not entirely sure what I should be covering, as almost all the people coming will have different abilities and requirements. To get around this tomorrow I’m going to miss out most of the actual features and options that the software has and instead talk about why you shouldn’t use PowerPoint!

Because I’m nice I’m making the slides available now for those people who are coming late or not at all. The most useful bits from the file are probably the accompanying notes but you can get away with just looking at the slides. Advanced PowerPoint Session 1. I should make it clear that some of the ideas covered are influenced by a series of posts from the Modern Foreign Languages Environment blog, the first of which can be viewed here.

The major crime that people make with PowerPoint is just using it to make presentations – the sort of didactic thing you get at university. There is nothing wrong with using ppt to do this, but it can do so much more. And it can be done better than most people usually do. There are, I think, three main uses of ppt : a lecture/presentation to a group where the presenter talks and the audience listens, sometimes there may be a bit of audience interaction, and even some choice in how the presentation goes; or it can be used as an alternative to a handout/textbook, where one user clicks through the slides and uses it as a personal learning tool, with the benefits(?) of animations and fancy colours; the other is as a non-linear quiz-style application that one person or a small group of people use, making use of linking from one slide to a few different ones and having their knowledge tested.

There are a few other ways of using ppt but these are the three ones I think are most commonly used (I’m happy to be challenged on this) and unfortunately they get mixed up too much. Too often people get confused between the first and second type and end up just boring the audience by reading out what they probably got from a book that they audience could have read. If you are doing a group presentation then there are a few rules I try to stick to. The underlying idea being that the ppt presentation is just aiding me, while I am the important part of the proceedings (egotistical or what?!), this means that I am ready at any point to just ditch the ppt.

There are a few other things I like to do but I’ll explore these with you in future posts.

Tags: audience_interaction, CPD, learning, lecture_presentation, powerpoint, slides

This entry was posted at 10:40 pm on the 18th of February, 2008 and is filed under Design, teach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.