Okay, friends. It's time for a presentation intervention. In Power Up, Jen and I write: "We’ve all experienced death by PowerPoint. (They are called bullet points for a reason, right?) Let’s do our part as educators and teach the world about effective presentation design. Few of our students are going to match the polish or hours of practice that professional speakers achieve, but they can still understand the basics of choosing thoughtful images and not filling their slides with text" (150). A logical place for us to start is by modeling what effective presentations look like every time we fire up the LCD projector and cue up our slides. But, where do we start? With research, of course! I've been doing a lot of reading lately from Rich Mayer's Handbook of Multimedia Learning, (which is a tome if I've ever seen one. It clocks in at some 900+ pages!) and from Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen Design, and have synthesized five key take-aways that any teacher (or any presenter, really) can use to avoid Death by PowerPoint. Check it out:
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