Creating More Effective Powerpoint Presentations

As an educator and teacher for more than 25 years, I have seen more than my fair share of trends and new ideas. When I first started teaching, everything was 'chalk and talk', with the occasional overhead transparency or worksheets produced using Banda machines.

At my first interview I was asked the question - "Is your teaching style didactic or heuristic?". I must admit that this floored me a bit. I thought that teaching was teaching, and that this involved standing at the front and instructing a willing class of students. But no, in the 70's and early 80's there was a movement towards more heuristic teaching where young people experimented and tried things, and used content in different ways. So we moved away from 'chalk and talk'.

With the heuristic model we then went through a phase of 'death by worksheet'. Every lesson seemed to be swamped with lots of worksheets that were easily copied with the new generation of photocopiers.

And then along came Powerpoint. Suddenly we had this amazing bit of kit that could generate exciting and visually stimulating experiences for our students. And now every lesson had to have a Powerpoint starter slide, with learning objectives and expected outcomes.

But guess what? We're now being told that our students are bored by Powerpoint presentations, and we're suffering from "death by bullet point".

I'll admit that there are some dreadful Powerpoint presentations out there, but used as part of an integrated learning approach Powerpoint still has a key position, and it shouldn't be discarded just because people seem keen to jump on the "death by bullet point" bandwagon.

I use Powerpoint every day, and over the past couple of years I must have produced hundreds of Powerpoint presentations. My style has developed, and I now understand a lot more about what works and what doesn't. Some of my younger colleagues are diverting their presentations to new tools such as Prezi, but all they are doing is re-packaging their old errors into a new format.

So here are a couple of suggestions to make your Powerpoint presentations really zing. It doesn't matter if you're presenting to a class of secondary school students or a top level corporate board meeting, the same principles apply:

• Use Font size 24 as a minimum.

• Use sans serif fonts. My preferred fonts are Verdana, Arial and Tahoma.

• Fonts such as Comic Sans have been shown to be especially useful with dyslexic students.

• To also help dyslexic students, avoid using white backgrounds. Use cream or soft pastel colours.

• Use dark coloured text on a light (not white) background.

• Avoid animations - having individual words or letters flying in from all directions used to look cool, but now it's just irritating.

• Limit the number of bullet points (if you have to use them) to a maximum of four or five per slide.

• Introduce your bullet points one at a time, just when you need them.

• Less is more. Using fewer words with exciting image backgrounds can really help to get your message across.

• Consider all learning styles in your presentation. With your slides and narration you've covered visual and auditory, but how are you going to encourage kinaesthetic learners?

The majority of Powerpoint presentations that I've seen fail to address a number of the points that I've listed above. Read the list again, and consider how you can tweak future presentations to make them much more effective - you owe it to your audience, whoever they might be!


------

Graham Bray is an enthusiastic internet marketer, and for nearly five years he has been developing websites as part of his Multiple Income Pathways. To learn more about internet marketing and how you can download newsletters, training videos and a *free audio recording and transcript* visit his blog at http://www.easierinternetmarketing.com