Professionals always speak of creating PowerPoint Presentations that motivate and entertain the audience. They also acknowledge that listeners can only absorb a small amount of information in one sitting. Not just this, with their effective speaking skills, they successfully draw the audience attention. However, if you are a teacher in college or high school then your goals will be different. Rather than encouraging students to make a final decision, you want them to study and discover new things each day. At the end, they will be tested on the basis of content and to grab the student’s attention, you can do it not emotionally, but intellectually.
It is not wrong to say that the primary goal of any educational PowerPoint presentation is not to entertain, but to teach. So, here are some of the principles for making exceptional Educational PowerPoint Presentations:
- If you help students to study later then giving them the necessary notes will allow them to recall the lecture you have delivered. You can distribute a handout made up of each of your slides printed with lots of white space. Not just this, you can also transfer presentation into a word processing file. The major advantage of this that you can modify the handout’s layout easily.
- Make sure only the main topics are included on the PowerPoint slide not all the individual points. Always keep in mind that the PowerPoint file is not your presentation, what you communicate is your presentation. Thus, elaborate the main points orally in your speech. It is of no doubt that people understand more when they hear the text as compared to when they see and hear it.
- While all the above mentioned principles can be helpful, but you may do an additional research on your own as well. For example: if you have two PowerPoint lectures in the same set up then it is best to deliver one with PowerPoint and the other without this software. Try to teach with a slideshow that includes images and graphics and then use it without much visual elements. By doing an experiment with these, you will come up with a system which is not only effective for your students but for you as well.
Hence, it is safe to say that teacher’s skills are still more important than the visual methods of delivering course’s curriculum. Nevertheless, PowerPoint has proven to be a great tool to enhance the learning process of students.
