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PowerPoint Tips, Resources, and Examples

PowerPoint Tips, Strategies, and Resources (for Teachers and Students)

PowerPoint is ubiquitous in the business and education worlds. It is a powerful and easy-to-use program that can be used to create engaging and visually enticing presentations. It creates opportunities for student creativity beyond the written essay. But PowerPoint presentations that contain too many slides, too much text, and frivolous special effects can actually detract from student learning. A PowerPoint presentation is not a goal in itself!

Excerpt from Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology: A Practical Guide for Teachers, by Teachers . . .

Ten Ways to Enhance Lectures with PowerPoint

  1. Include visual evidence in your lectures with images of art, artifacts, and architecture.
  2. In discussing an author, include audio and video clips of her reading her work, which can be put directly into PowerPoint.
  3. Include charts, graphs, and figures to supply statistical support to an argument.
  4. Show a sequence of maps that demonstrate change over time.
  5. Compile short examples of student writing to critique or workshop.
  6. Sum up the essential points or questions of a lecture in an outline slide.
  7. Use charts, diagrams, and matrices to help students see relationships between ideas or information.
  8. Use portraits or photographs so students can see pictures of the people you discuss.
  9. Include cartoons or funny illustrations to inject humor into your presentation.
  10. Use slides with titles and subheadings to help listeners follow the argument in longer lectures.

Warning!! PowerPoint can be used to deliver some extremely bad teaching. The classic parody of terrible PowerPoint was created by Google programmer Peter Norvig, who rewrote the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation. The complete results can be found at http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Google Docs Presentation

Google Docs consists of a free, Web-based word processor, a spreadsheet, form creator, and presentation application offered by Google. Google Docs Presentation is comparable to PowerPoint. Presentation is not as feature-rich as PowerPoint, but it has several advantages. For one, it's free. It's also accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection. One neat feature is that several people can edit a Presentation in real time, though you don't have to. Furthermore, students don't have to send PowerPoint files to each other and they don't need to have PowerPoint at home.

PowerPoint Design Hints for Students

  • PowerPoint is a visual media- focus on images and graphics- Often an image and a title is all you need for a great slide to support your own words. Choose powerful images and label them thoughtfully.
  • Use Text as Prompts- The text on your slide should mostly consist of words that will help the audience follow your presentation, like topic headings or concise statements of key point or essential questions. Keep the number of words on each slide to a minimum.
  • Use Simple Designs- When choosing a design template, avoid designs that take up too much space. Stick with basic designs that will keep your audience focused on you and the content, not the window decorations.
  • Avoid flashy animations and transitions- Much of what you can do with PowerPoint is a waste of time. Focus on creating great content with effective illustrations, and don't spend your time making words shoot in on rocket ships.

The best way to reinforce these principles is to create rubrics that grade student presentations heavily on the content and quality of the student presentation, minimally on simple, elegant layout, and not at all on flashy extras.

Here are a few examples of rubrics for PowerPoint presentations:

PowerPoint Tips and Strategies

  1. Keep the "66" Maximum in mind: six slides and six lines of text  per line. Following this "rule" may help prevent a presentation from becoming too long, have too much text, and being rushed when delivered.
  2. Consider providing the PPT text to the students beforehand. If they're rushing to take notes before the next slide appears on the screen they are not focused on what you or students are saying.
    tip: You can copy PPT text in NORMAL VIEW and paste it into a document or e-mail.
  3. Turn the bulb (on the projector) off periodically during a PPT. Shift their complete attention to an important point you are making.  Or engage them in a discussion, or an activity. Turn the bulb back on when you are ready to continue the PPT.
    tip: If you want to go quickly to a particular slide in VIEW SHOW mode, right click (CTRL + click) when the show is running. The show will stop and a menu bar will appear. Click on
    GO --->SLIDE NAVIGATOR and select the slide you want to view.
  4. Consider making your PowerPoint available online. That way your students might concentrate better on the ideas presented in class knowing they can see the entire PowerPoint again online. Just keep in mind that if you put it on a web site, and the PPT contains copyrighted images, you may be in violation of copyright laws.
    tip: You don't need PowerPoint software to view a PPT show. You can download the free PowerPoint Viewer from Microsoft. It enables you to view, but not edit, a PPT show. Handy for kids who don't have PPT on their home computers.
  5. Make slide transitions fairly unobtrusive, or don't include them at all. The less distraction the better.

Finding PowerPoint Presentations with Google's Advanced Search

When you go to the Google homepage, http://www.google.com/, just to the right of the search bar you will see a small link for Advanced Search. Click on that link and you will see a variety of powerful search options. One of those search options is File Format, where you can choose to ask Mr. Google to look only for PowerPoint presentations. Select this option, put your search terms in at the top, and for many topics you will have dozens of ready-made PowerPoint presentations to choose from.

The PowerPoint Slide Show Viewer

To be able to edit PowerPoint slideshows, you need the very expensive PowerPoint software. Anyone, however, can view a slideshow using the free PowerPoint Viewer. You can download the viewer at this site, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/CD010798701033.aspx, or just Google search for "PowerPoint Viewer." With these viewers, your students should be able to watch and print your PowerPoint presentations, even if they don't own PowerPoint. You can also open PowerPoint presentations and edit them in OpenOffice.org's Impress.

Finding Video and Multimedia clips

Video is a great tool to use in the classroom, but finding free video clips can sometimes be a challenge. This useful list of free "Educational Video Clips/Mini Movies" is a collaboration between Don Donn and Phillip Martin. They lead you to clips from a variety of sources and organize them by academic subject. On a related note, if your school has a subscription to Discovery Education streaming (formerly United Streaming) our Teaching History with Technology website has a helpful article on the integrated use of video.

Microsoft offers animated clip art, sounds, and video clips at its Design Gallery Live at http://dgl.microsoft.com/

You might also try video-sharing services such as YouTube.com, TeacherTube.com, and SchoolTube.com, though YouTube is sometimes blocked at schools. You can download YouTube videos via www.kickyoutube.com.

Note: You will need a media player such as Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, or Quicktime to view video clips. . (These players are all free plug-ins. ) Be advised that not all video files respond the same to the different media players. For instance, a .mov file runs best in Quicktime. PowerPoint does best with .midi and .wav clips.

Scoring Power Points

Jamie McKenzie is the Editor of From Now On - The Educational Technology Journal, a Web-based "ZINE" published online since 1991 and has been a middle school teacher of English and social studies, an assistant principal, an elementary principal, assistant superintendent and superintendent of two districts on the east coast of the U.S. Jamie points out that while PowerPoint can be used to create engaging and visually enticing presentations it can also be an unfortunate example of technology done for technology's sake. He argues that we can teach our students how to combine presentation software with other forms of communication, writing and reporting to persuade, convince, inform and enlighten.

http://www.fno.org/sept00/powerpoints.html

PowerPoint Resources:

PowerPoint in the Classroom

Free Skills: PowerPoint Tutorials

The PowerPoint FAQ: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions About PowerPoint

"Scoring PowerPoints" by Jim McKenzie

Internet4teachers: Powerpoint

Inspiration Examples - Social Studies

Visit NCSS Network
created by Tom Daccord
EdTechTeacher

Summer 2010 Teaching with Technology Workshops

Organized by Tom Daccord and Justin Reich of Best of History Web Sites, Center for Teaching History with Technology, & National Council of Social Studies Technology Committee

Join educators from around the world who come to Boston each summer for a memorable educational experience:

8th annual Teaching History with Technology
Dates: June 30-July 2 or Aug 4-6, 2010

Geography & Maps 2.0
Date: June 29, 2010

Primary Sources 2.0
Date: June 28, 2010

Connecting Classrooms with Web 2.0
Dates: July 22-23, 2010

4th annual Teaching English and Language Arts with Technology
Dates: July 6-8, 2010

Creative Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards
Dates: July 19-20, 2010

21st Century Skills- Frameworks and Teaching Strategies
Date: July 28, 2010

and more. . .

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