Effectively Presenting Course
Content
Dr. John Paul Foxe
Educational Developer
Learning & Teaching Office
PowerPoint as a Tool for
Presenting Course Content
• What NOT to do!
• Creating Effective PowerPoint
• Building Your Slides
• PowerPoint Best Practices
• Keeping Your Students Engaged
Images and text do not mix
• Images in the background
(after applying a little
tasteful fading)
• Paragraphs of text overlaid
on the images
• Makes the images hard to
look at and the text hard to
read
• Perfect, a lose-lose
situation!
Images and text do not mix
• Could have consolidated
the text in one part of the
image, using the image's
horizontal guiding lines
• The slide manages to look
sloppy as well as
unreadable
• Bonus points for
misspelling "carburetor"
To be fair, social networking
is complicated
• First rule of flow
charts….they should be
intelligible
• A good PowerPoint series
makes sense on its own
• The flow chart presented
here is simply baffling,
and the pictures don't
help much
To be fair, social networking
is complicated
• What's going where?
• Who's getting what?
• What's the difference
between a one in a big
black square and a one in
a little red circle?
• What is a "follower feed?”
• Why are the some of the
"salmon" going
downstream?
A kaleidoscope of confusion
• Colours are great for
attracting an audience
• Stick with two or three,
not six or seven
• Use colours consistently
• The colours in this "social
business map" don't
clarify anything
A kaleidoscope of confusion
• Why are "Social Web" and "Social
Enterprise" in different colours but
"Cloud/SaaS" and "On-Premise" in
the same colour?
• Why do blue and green diamonds
populate orange and white areas
as well as blue and green areas?
• Why does "Trend" appear as two
converging white areas while
"Standards" appears as a single
vanishing brown area?
• The big labels along the bottom
appear in random colours that
correspond to nothing else on the
chart. Why?
Flow chart on steroids
• Left side, not so bad
• The text is in short bullet
points
• Colours and fonts are
restrained
• Presenter used a basic
slide template
Flow chart on steroids
• Presumably the red
arrows are there to
explain what's going on in
the maze of black arrows
• The red arrows are
somewhat helpful, except
for the jarring overlay of
red on black
• As for the 10,000 black
arrows, they probably
make a point, or
something, but really?
The endless "summary"
• Too much text
• Font too small
• Impenetrable slab of 10point text to provide an
"executive summary”
• If the audience reads all
the text, what is there left
to say?
100 graphs in one little slide
• Graphs and charts are
usually PowerPoint
presentation gold
• They're visual,
informative, and hard to
screw up
• So, obviously, the more
graphs and charts, the
better, right?
Bad bullet points
• Reducing paragraphs to
bullet points helps your
audience follow the
presentation more easily
• This doesn't mean
sticking bullet-point icons
in front of paragraphs
• As a rule of thumb, if you
have to resize your text
to 12- or 10-point type to
get it to fit, you have too
much text
Bad bullet points
• The text is tiny
• The bullet points are
longer than ten/twelve
words each
• At least one of them is a
full-fledged paragraph
Creating Effective PowerPoint
• The first step is to think about the
significance of the presentation
• Why does the content matter?
• How will you grab the audience’s attention?
What do you want them to do?
• How will your slides help you make
meaning?
Creating Effective PowerPoint
• The second step is to think about the
structure
• A
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•
•
good presentation structure is:
convincing
memorable
scalable
Creating Effective PowerPoint
• PowerPoint should serve as a visual aid
• PowerPoint should NOT serve as a
teleprompter
• Slides should reinforce not repeat your
words
• “If you wouldn’t write it on a blackboard,
you shouldn’t write it on a slide”
Building Your Slides
• Don’t include too many points at
once
• Slides with dense graphics will
distract or confuse your audience
• There are no perfect rules to creating
effective slides beyond this one:
Keep it simple
Building Your Slides
• Lawrence Lessig
• White typewriter font on black
background
• Short notes
• Bold images
• Purposeful use of colour
PowerPoint Slides Best Practices
1. Avoid premade templates and
clipart
2. Use high quality photographs or
images that pop!
3. Avoid sound effects, distracting
backgrounds, or gratuitous
animations and transitions
PowerPoint Slides Best Practices
4. Pick high contrast colors for the text
and background of your slides
5. Use sans-serif fonts, as they are
easier to read
6. Emphasize text with italics rather
than underlining
PowerPoint Slides Best Practices
7. Use a large font size
8. Leave a border around any text
9. Cite your sources
Keeping Students Engaged:
Interactive PowerPoint
• Engage your students from the very
beginning
• Use “real world” examples
• An anecdote
• An image
• A memory
• Anything that grounds your talk in
the “right now”
Keeping Students Engaged:
Interactive PowerPoint
• The Monta
Method
• More
conversational
than typical
PowerPoint
Keeping Students Engaged:
Interactive PowerPoint
• Annotate slides
during the
presentation
• These can be
saved along with
the PowerPoint
Keeping Students Engaged:
Interactive PowerPoint
• QR Codes
• Link slides to
– Additional
material
– Library catalog
records
– Online surveys
– Full lecture
notes
– An assignment
PowerPoint for Student
Presentation
“pecha kucha”
20 slides, 20 seconds per slide
Used to summarize topics
Explain in a compelling, creative and
comprehensive way
• Speed can become a proxy for
enthusiasm
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Summary
• What NOT to do!
Summary
• What NOT to do!
• Creating Effective PowerPoint
• Building Your Slides
• PowerPoint Best Practices
• Keeping Your Students Engaged
Resources
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Delwiche, A. & Ananthanarayanan, V. (2004). Pedagogical Value of
PowerPoint – Recommendations. EDUCAUSE. Retrieved from
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SWR0416.pdf
Jones, J.B. (2009, November). Challenging the Presentation Paradigm (in
6 minutes, 40 seconds): Pecha Kucha. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/challenging-thepresentation-paradigm-in-6-minutes-40-seconds-pecha-kucha/22807
Kapterev, A. (2007). Death by PowerPoint [slide show]. Retrieved from
http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-by-powerpoint
Mann, M. (2007, August 23). How I Made My Presentations a Little Better.
43 Folders. Retrieved from http://www.43folders.com/2007/08/23/betterpresentations
Reynolds, G. (2005, October 2). The "Monta Method." Presentation Zen.
Retrieved from
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/10/the_monta_m
etho.html
Reynolds, G. (2005, October 7). The "Lessig Method" of presentation.
Presentation Zen. Retrieved from
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/10/the_lessig_me
th.html
Schwartz, M. (2011, July 7). Fun with QR Codes. LTO Blog. Retrieved from
http://lto.blog.ryerson.ca/2011/07/07/fun-with-qr-codes/