Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Powerpoints for school

In high school (at least currently) the two most used software is a text editor and a slide show presenter. The former is quite easy to use, type some word in, then BAM, you're done! But the slide show part is sort of..uhh... hard to do a good one. Since I'm like the computer genius in my class, everybody asks me to critique their presentations. Most of the problems I see can be fixed by a simple mouse click or a few stroke of the keyboard.

  1. Terrible background - Do a Google image search on a random topic right now, and some super duper cool picture will pop up. Try not to use those pictures as backgrounds unless it's necessary or it's just plain blow your eye sockets off good. If so, then right click on the text holder (the thing surrounding text, it's a box with dotted lines), and choose Format Placeholder or Autoshape (on the Mac, I think), and choose a color opposite of your text (ex, white if text is black) and slide the transparancy towards 60 to 70% (or for that matter, whatever you want).
  2. Too much text - Many students think that a PP is a substitute for spoken words, but it instead is a tool to enhance your speaking experience. When people can choose between reading a typed sentence than a spoken sentence, people generally chose written. So instead of paying attention to your wonderful speech, they're busy reading your text. To solve this problem, just take out that junk of text, put it on a notecard and just put the main idea's on the PP.
  3. Too much dazzle and not enough of information - Students spend waayyy too much time on animation, sound, and backgrounds and not enough on the actual project. It is almost scary for me to witness a PP presentation that has way too much pictures in it. To solve this problem, first write all the info, THEN do all the pictures and crap.
These are just the most common ones that I notice that can be corrected easily.
Stay tuned for examples...good and bad from me :) (takes a long time to upload 100MB of stuff, but very short to download...)

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