PowerPoint: Use it well

Hello everyone,

PowerPoint is a wonderful program. I have used it in a variety of situations, and I have been in a variety of situations in which it has been used.

At its best, it is very entertaining. It keeps the information flowing. It gives access to a variety of visual and audio resources. It can be colorful and playful as well as factual. It can reinforce learning like no white board ever thought possible.

At its worst, it is deadly dull and factually incorrect.

In other words, it is a tool, no better and no worse than the worker who is using it.

Please please please (let me add another please if it will help) use it well.

The use of PowerPoint has little or nothing to do with age or experience. I have seen good and bad PowerPoint presentations at every level. I cannot tell you how many training sessions I have sat in (in a variety of situations in and out of school), taught by supposed experts, who gave awful presentations with poorly thought out PowerPoint presentations. I have likewise seen new teachers who were very good at it. And vice versa.

May I give a list of things that bug me when I see PowerPoint presentations? These are things that, I believe, make for terrible PowerPoint. My hope is that, if you know that they bug people, you will avoid them yourselves.

1. The font is unreadable.
This may be because the font is too small to be read throughout the room. It may be because of poor contrast (blue background, red letters, for example). It may be because the font is too ornate to be seen clearly. Perhaps the background has patterns that are too busy (a herringbone design, for example) to allow the letters to be read. Maybe there is too much to read.

Keep your written material short and readable. If you have to use many slides to get the information up, then so be it. One slide with hundreds of unreadable words makes me want to drop out of school--and I have a doctorate. Hundreds of slides with a few words and lots of pictures can make me happy. Happier, anyway.

2. The information is incorrect or incorrectly presented.
Check your facts. There is a power to electronic presentation that makes factually incorrect presentations as insidious as viruses. Your students will always believe them, and they will always be wrong, because you were wrong. (At least in live presentation, you can claim a momentary lapse or a human mistake. When you take the time to put your mistakes into a PowerPoint presentation, you're just fertilizing weeds.)

Make sure your spelling and grammar are correct. I trained my English students to disregard all electronic presentations with misspellings. It indicates poor editing, which indicates possible errors in fact. If you have trouble with spelling or grammar, get a friend to help you.

3. The teacher treats a PowerPoint presentation the way a lecturer treats notes.
The PowerPoint presentation should enhance your classroom presentation, not BE your classroom presentation. Why should I go to a live teacher in a live class and listen to the lecturer drone on reading directly off the screen, when I can just read the PowerPoint off the internet or a printout and get exactly the same information? You are in front of your class because you have the power to respond to your audience and guide them.

Don't feel bound to the presentation as stored in your computer. Feel free to skip slides if necessary. Use the white board to clarify the slide if the slide needs it. Interact with your students. Let them do the reading at least.

4. There are no pictures.
I want pictures. I love video. Sound is beautiful. I once saw a math PowerPoint that used cartoon sounds and animation to emphasize steps in a math problem and it made me happy just to watch it. I've seen lovely short videos that emphasized important points. If you're teaching a concrete vocabulary word, you ought to have a picture of the object the word stands for. If you're teaching an abstract vocabulary word, and you can find a picture that helps to explain the word, you ought to use it.

Of course, all of these things can be done without PowerPoint. The program just makes them very easy to keep track of, combine, and use. It's a tool, and it works well that way.

Even clip art is good if it relates to the concept.

5. Teachers leave a slide up when they have moved on to another subject.
I confess, I never erased my black or white boards until I wanted to put something new on them. This is the same concept, except the projection is more powerful than the chalk line. Feel free to put blank slides in your presentation so you can discuss a concept without distraction.

Feel free to have PowerPoint reveal concepts in sequence. Don't put everything up at once if it doesn't have to be there. This is the equivalent of using a piece of paper to cover a part of an overhead projection so that it can be revealed gradually.

If you use it, use it well.

Jeff Combe