powerpoint
Academic 1 comment beyond bullet points, power point, powerpoint, presentation zen, presentations
How to create a Great PowerPoint Presentation
How to Create a Great PowerPoint – Take 2.0 from Alvin Trusty on Vimeo
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This is a very long video but it addresses some useful tips and tricks how to make nice slides in powerpoint. It starts with a ballroom presentation or a presentation without bullet points. This will get you updated on death with powerpoint and how to create slides for different audiences. The biggest part is on how to create those slides. This topic is usually not covered in the books on presentations.
Related blog post:
Presentations for Physicians
Thanks to Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Education 16 comments Education, lectures, powerpoint, slides, teaching
When to make PowerPoint slides available to students?
Normally I am used to put the slides of my lectures online on BlackBoard before the actual lecture. In this way the hand outs can be used to understand the material better, at least that is what I hope for. Others never give their slides to students because they’re afraid the students will not attend the lectures when in possession of the slides. Still others put them online just after the lecture. Now which is best?
Providing the slides before the lecture has advantages according to recent published research:
- Most students reported using the slides as a guide for note-taking while students to which the slides were only available after the lecture used them instead of their notes or as a double check on their notes made during the lecture.
- On average, students in the classes where slides were posted before lecture reviewed notes after lecture more often, than did students in classes where slides were posted after the lecture.
- Significant main effects showed that classes in which slides were posted before lecture had greater satisfaction with the timing of slide availability, greater satisfaction with the amount of material on the slides, and greater overall satisfaction with the slides than classes in which slides were posted after lecture.
- The students in the before-lecture class had a significantly higher mean proportion of participation than did participators in the after-lecture class. The class that had access to lecture slides before lecture had a greater average participation rate per person than did the class that could only access the slides after class. This finding is consistent with the idea that having lecture slides for note-taking during class frees up students’ attention for other classroom activities.
- Also class attendance was found to be considerably higher in the class that had slides available before lecture than in the class that could only access lecture slides after class. Posting the slides before class has a forewarning function, they may alert students to material with which they expect to have difficulty and thus encourage them to attend lecture.
- Students prefer having lecture slides to use as a note-taking guide because it helps direct their attention to key information in the lecture, and because they can add their own ideas to these critical points as the lecture progresses
The groups didn’t differ in the number of downloads. The slides available before lecture were downloaded as much as those available after the lecture and also the timing of slide availability did not significantly affect students’ exam scores in either of these two types of courses. This last outcome was surprising, especially because students reported that they felt their studying and exam performance was better when they had the slides before lecture. Exam performance is more likely to be determined by several different factors working in combination such as individual learning styles and studying practices also contribute to how well students perform on exams.
How was this study done?
In this study, students in an introductory Research Methods course and a fourth-year Cognitive Development course, both taught in the Fall and Winter semesters, were provided with PowerPoint lecture slides either before lecture or after lecture. Course material was held constant within each type of class. We collected outcome measures of attendance, class participation, and exam performance. At the end of the semester, students completed surveys containing questions about how they used the slides and their perceptions about the slides. We also obtained information
about students’ attendance in other classes during the semester. We then examined whether providing lecture slides online before class or after class contributed to differences in the outcome measures, as well as contributing to how students used and perceived the lecture slides.
When do you make your slides available? Since before or after lecture availability doesn’t influence exam performance why bother?
slides are simply another tool that must be incorporated into effective study strategies.
Kimberley A. Babb, Craig Ross (2009). The timing of online lecture slide availability and its effect on attendance, participation, and exam performance Computers & Education, 52 (4), 868-881 DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.009
Education 6 comments Education, lectures, powerpoint, traditional presentations
PowerPoint in Education
PowerPoint is best used when students are expected to retain complex graphics, animation, and figures. For alphanumeric information (e.g. text and numbers) Powerpoint as well as traditional presentations can be used. If students are expected to retain information and/or concepts that are best conveyed through dialog or verbal explanation, traditional presentations appear to be best. This type of information should not be shared verbally in the presence of PowerPoint, because people tend to focus on that what is presented on the slides as opposed to what is verbalized. If students are expected to retain simple graphs and alphanumeric information that is verbalized and displayed visually, either presentation style is acceptable. Overall, this study explains the ‘‘intelligent use” of PowerPoint – when to use or not use. Educational technologies are most effective when used properly.
The ‘‘intelligent use” of educational technologies can be defined with three components (1) How do people learn (cognitive component)? (2) How can the learning experience be facilitated (instruction component)? (3) How can technology be used to improve instruction and learning (technology component)? Over the years there has been research to support the three components as individual entities and collectively as the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. The third component has received much attention as researchers try to evaluate the effectiveness of new educational technologies, particularly PowerPoint, by giving it the correct use students can become excellent at school, with the possibility of being eligible for a burger king scholarship.
What is meant with traditional lectures or – presentations?
These are lectures with no use of electronic technology, no slides or PowerPoint but just verbal lecture with the use of chalk when needed (chalk and talk).
Most important results of this study with the objective to determine how to present information effectively for maximum retention:
- PowerPoint negatively affects the recall of auditory information delivered during lectures.Students retained 15% less information delivered verbally by the lecturer during PowerPoint presentations.
- The mean scores for graphic retention were higher for PowerPoint (25%) and traditional (23%) presentations than reported for the no class group.
- In PowerPoint there is no more information retained than in traditional lectures (talk and chalk).
- In PowerPoint presentations graphic scores were higher than audio scores and in traditional presentations audio scores were higher than graphic scores. Overall scores of information retainment were not significantly different.
- Students prefer PowerPoint presentations over traditional lectures. Students did not view information on the slides as more important than what the professor verbalized.
Why is this important?
Their were mixed results among studies that investigated the beneficial effects of PowerPoint on performance, and
This study offered high granularity analyses by decomposing the overall scores into auditory, graphic, and alphanumeric scores to reveal new insight on the performance comparisons. It considered retention of auditory information presented to the students without the presence of PowerPoint (e.g., traditional lecture), auditory information in the presence of PowerPoint, and visual (i.e., graphic and alphanumeric) information displayed on the chalkboard and PowerPointTM slides in forming the quiz and its analysis.
Next week: The timing of online lecture slide availability
April Savoy, Robert W. Proctor, Gavriel Salvendy (2009). Information retention from PowerPoint™ and traditional lectures Computers & Education, 52 (4), 858-867 DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.005