Hi.
This is Jennifer Gonzalez, and I'm going to talk to you today about
how Presentation Zen fixed my bad PowerPoints.
So, to demonstrate
I am going to show you an old PowerPoint from back when I thought I was
great at Powerpoints.
here's the first slide. I organized my material in outline form,
placed it on the slide, and then I
made my PowerPoints available to my students
so that they could review them later.
And then I would give them handouts like this sometimes,
or just send them the PowerPoint
as an attachment. And so this whole process is probably really familiar
to a lot of people looking at this, right?
According to Presentation Zen, the problem with these kinds of slides
is that they really do not require the presenter
to be interesting or informative or really
even be there sometimes.
We make the slides into kind of a script
so that they could basically stand completely on their own.
If that's the case then what's the point of presenting them live at all?
Why bother to actually talk to your students, when we could just give them a
PowerPoint and have them read it?
Some people would argue that the presenter
is really what makes the difference, that even though we might have slides that
tell everything, that we talk "off the slides" and we offer
our own personal experiences,
you know, and and really enliven and enrich the content.
But the thing is, with a block of text on the screen,
your students aren't exactly going to be captivated. So I'm just gonna take
one slide from that presentation and I'm going to revise it.
I'll show you how I changed it to fit the principles of Presentation Zen.
So the point of this slide was to introduce the ideas
of Jean Piaget. The two main problems with this slide
is that there's way too much text on it. And Presentation Zen
emphasizes that we should have as little text as possible on our slides.
And also there's no visuals, and many many people are visual learners, and so
if concept is going to be memorable to them,
we need to put something on the screen that is going to help us remember the concept.
A lot of Power Point templates have visuals in them,
but they're really just decoration; they're not there to help us
actually remember the concepts.
So, the question that Garr Reynolds asks us to be constantly asking ourselves is
"What information are you giving in written words,
that you could replace with a visual?"
So here's the new version of the slide. It starts with a blank white slide
with only a few words. I put "Piaget," that's a key term
and "cognitive development," which is what he was all about.
So. The point of the original slide was to explain to students that
Piaget's theory tells us that students grow,
children grow from being very concrete thinkers
to very abstract thinkers.
So I put a picture of a child holding a pinwheel, with the word "concrete" under it.
and when I'm giving this presentation I would explain for a while --
-- before I put anything else up there --
what concrete thinking is. It's the idea that something only exists
if you can actually see and touch it, right in front of you.
And then, as they mature,
children become more abstract thinkers. To show this,
I would show the child without the pinwheel in her hand, but
instead it's in a thought bubble: She can actually conceptualize
of the pinwheel without having it actually in her hand.
And that represents abstract thinking.
Now here's the big difference with this slide.
Apart from the fact that I think it's way more visually appealing
than the one before it,
when I talk to my students later about Piaget,
all I have to do you say to them, "the pinwheel," and they're gonna remember
concrete and abstract, they're gonna remember these images.
Also notice, again, the "building." I could have had everything just plunked down at once,
but Reynolds really advises us to build our slides a little at a time with animation.
And I'm going to show you how to do that.
So if you introduce elements as you talk about them, it can have greater impact.
Okay so here's the old slide
now you've probably already thought about this, that there's a bunch of stuff that
was on the slide that is not there now.
Two things about that: Number one that's the stuff that you're going to talk about
in your lecture, in your presentation. You put the main ideas up
on visuals, and then you talk to your
your students, or your audience. You don't just read it off the slide.
Now there's always going to be the concern that you're going to
forget something, or maybe
not represent it in the way that the students are going to remember, or
they won't have a take-away
to be able to remember all the information.
That is where the Almighty Handout comes into play.
You create these visually appealing slides with minimal text,
and then you provide your audience with a handout
that has as much detail on it as you want. And the point of your
presentation was to get them interested and motivated to read this handout.
One last slide I'll show you is the cover. This title page came from the template,
the cover came from a template, and it was fine. I thought it was nice and clean,
but now that I've read Presentation Zen,
I won't see it the same way again. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you the revision of that.
So starting with a nice clean blank screen,
I inserted a piece of free clipart that I got online.
And I chose marbles because the topic
of the lecture is differentiation in meeting individual students' needs and
marbles are all different, so that kind of
sets that theme already.
And then inserted two text boxes that give the title of the presentation.
So I'm going to exit out, go into PowerPoint and I'll show you
how I got that. I'm going to create a new slide
I'm going to get a lot of different slide options but I'm going to choose "blank."
and then I insert...
a picture...
and then I can enter a text box, so again we're on "insert" again,
click "text box," and
we get an arrow here, I can just hold down
my mouse, my left button (clicking and dragging)
Okay, I also added a second title, so I'll go ahead and show you
how I did that, and the reason I did that was so that if I wanted them to
come in at different times
I could do that.
[silence]
To build this slide, I'm going to click the picture first
click on animations, I'm really a big fan of just the
"fade in" ... I'll click that...
Okay right now it's set to fade in kind of slow, I kind of like things
to fade in fast so I'm going to change the time. And so that is my first
item that's coming in on the animation, and then...
I'll have this one come in second
have that one fade in too.
Again, keep it simple.
Click the third item and add animation to that one. Let me save...
...and, we can take a look
at just this slide. It starts out blank,
every time I click I get my picture, then I get a title,
and I get another one.
The concepts presented here all come from
Garr Reynolds' fantastic book, Presentation Zen. I urge you all to read it.
There is a more extensive review of this book available right now on the Cult of Pedagogy website.
And in that, I really talk more about how
these concepts can be applied to teachers.
Thanks so much, and go make your PowerPoints better.