Using PowerPoint

While preparing a PowerPoint presentation takes a bit more work, it can be a very versatile teaching aid. It is similar to overhead slides but like the visualiser, it can also incorporate colour images, text, graphs and more. It can be powerful teaching tool, providing the lecturer with a structure for the lecture and students with a framework for their learning.

How PowerPoint can enhance your teaching:

• provides an appropriate structure for your lecture
• defines key points clearly
• provides guidance as to how much can be achieved in the time available
• illustrates statistics graphically or in diagrams
• enhances student understanding with images
• overcomes issues of hard-to-read handwriting

Suggestions and Tips

• Use audio cues to indicate when you are changing slides and which slide you are changing to so that students accessing via Lectopia can ensure they are looking at the appropriate slide.
• Backup plan - have transparencies or a hardcopy as backup. Equipment failure can occur at the most unexpected times, so make sure you have alternatives. Transparencies can be used on the overhead projector while the hardcopy can be used under a visualiser.
• Run your presentation from the hard drive of the laptop rather than from a floppy disk drive. This is more reliable and faster.
• Turn off screensavers on computers

Text & Titles

• Use the Click to insert Title feature in PowerPoint as Lectopia uses these titles when making your slides available online.
• Use point form and keywords.
• Limit to 3-4 points per slide.
• Choose easily readable sans-serif fonts such as Arial or Helvetica
• Minimum font size should be 20 points
• Italics are more difficult to read than normal fonts.
• Avoid the use of UPPERCASE where possible (it can be misconstrued as shouting)

Slide Layout

• Use landscape mode for your slide presentation. This is the default layout for PowerPoint. Portrait mode is not handled very well by PowerPoint and your slides can lose a lot of information when Lectopia tries to turn them into a format suitable to be put online.
• Choose uniform backgrounds and do not clutter the slide with too much detail.
• Use bullets and animation to keep student attention.
• Use a dark background with light text as this is easiest to read.
• Keep a good margin on all sides of the slide.
• Keep all the points on a slide justified on the left.

Images

• Place graphics off-centre, leaving room for text and better balance.
• When inserting scanned pictures, use a medium-sized resolution, such as 150dpi.
• The larger the resolution of your images, the larger the PowerPoint file will be overall. It will therefore take longer for the file to be converted. When there are too many images and the file is too large, it may cause a problem in the conversion.
• While you can insert a movie file inside PowerPoint to show to your students, it will not be sent with the file when it is uploaded to Lectopia.
• Final slide: use this as a signal that you have reached the end of your presentation.