Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Death by PowerPoint

Love this presentation. I have been trying to follow the right rules of PowerPoint presentation for a while now. When I do it right I get FANTASTIC enthusiasm from the audience. But don't kid yourself, to do it right takes hours of tracking down the right images, putting all together, and rehearsing.

Recently I also read an article on why it is a bad idea to give out your PowerPoint presentations, which made me rethink doing it myself. When you do a PowerPoint presentation following rules like in this one, you have very little text. So often what ends up happening is the presentation loses meaning, or is hard to understand after some time has been put between when you saw it given and re-reading the slides. Because of this presenters are encouraged to do presentation notes instead, and send those out. As they say, if someone can read your presentation off your slides, you haven't created a presentation, you have created a document in slide form.

Posted via web from Completely Barking Mad

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love, love, love it!!! I went to a presentation last week where she literally copied text from the text book she handed out, then she read it out loud. That was it. I was torn between dying of boredom or taking her down for wasting my time!

Heidi Schempp Fournier said...

That does sound terrible. I have seen that happen with instructors all too often. They rely to heavily on the pre-packaged materials that come with their book. I am not a fan of doing this as the PPT slides almost always say exactly what the book does. Why are you there for as an instructor if you aren't going to add something new to the class? Students can read books all on their own.

Muffy said...

I have wanted to kill myself at some powerpoint presentations. Have meaning and passion or don't do it!