Presentation Makeover Week
Since 2009, Just say no to PowerPoint week has unofficially taken place at the beginning of February. PowerPoint does not require bad behavior and other tools can just as easily produce poor slides, so I propose changing the name to Presentation Makeover Week and adding a challenge.
In the first week of February do one or more of the following:
- Create a presentation with no text
- Incorporate a new (to you) active learning strategy into a presentation
- Try a new (to you) presentation tool
Afterwards, come back here and share your experiences in a comment, so we can learn from each other.
UPDATE: see the poster here.
Active learning
Everyone wants students to be actively engaged in learning. One way to make a lecture-oriented course more learner-centered is to split class time into several segments with short periods of student activity in between. Try polling, write-pair-share, or another strategy from one of these resources:
- Active Learning Strategies in Face-to-Face Courses (IDEA Center)
- Learning by Doing (Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent, NC State)
- Active Learning Techniques (Indiana U)
If you are worried about not having time to present an important topic, consider moving students’ first exposure to that material out of the classroom – and holding them accountable for it. This idea is at the heart of the flipped class approach.
Presenting without text
Students experience cognitive overload when they try to simultaneously process the words spoken by an instructor and those projected from a computer. Psychologist Richard Mayer’s modality principle argues that verbal information is processed better as narration than as on-screen text.
In Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds explains that images can be much more powerful than words – especially when accompanied by a story. Try making a presentation with no text at all. Use the best images you can find; you may even learn a little about visual design in the process. If you can’t eliminate text completely, limit yourself to an average of one word per slide – but no bullet points!
- Seven (+?) resources for better PowerPoint
- 9 sources of free images for projects
- Principles of Design, quick reference poster
Other tools
PowerPoint is simple to use and very flexible, but you can easily fall into bad habits when the default layout is a bulleted list. Trying a tool like Prezi, Slides.com, or Keynote may help you abandon those evil ways. When you return later on with a new set of eyes, you may find that PowerPoint does the cool thing you discovered in the other tool. Or you may simply have a new option in your bag of tricks.
- Eleven+ ways NOT to use PowerPoint
- Comparison chart – PowerPoint and Prezi
- Slide tool gets new name, more features
Flickr images: Ellis Hall Active Learning Classroom by Queen’s University
and Sisters, Explorers, by Derek Bruff
Trackbacks
- Educational Prezi nominations sought - Notre Dame Learning
- Presentation Zen rubric - Notre Dame Learning
- Visual design for presentations - Notre Dame Learning
- Presentations – Technology Resources
- Presentation Zen rubric | NspireD2: Learning Technology in Higher Ed.
- Visual design for presentations | NspireD2: Learning Technology in Higher Ed.
- My Year Without Power Point | summercherland
- Announcing the Winners of the 2015 Agile Learning Educational Prezi Awards!
- Presentation Makeover Week poster | NspireD2: Learning Technology in Higher Ed.
- Educational Prezi nominations sought | NspireD2: Learning Technology in Higher Ed.
- The Agile Learning Educational Prezi Awards 2015 – Call for Nominations
NspireD2: Learning Technology in Higher Ed. 
Reblogged this on technology and learning and commented:
Simple ways to incorporate more active learning in the classroom.