Far "Beyond Bullet Points"

I made this slideshow using my normal Microsoft Office Powerpoint program and uploading it to GoogleDocs. The slideshow is one that I would use in a beginner Spanish class since conjugating verbs is a fundamental basic to teaching students. Although it may seem like it doesn't make much sense and is lacking information, I followed an approach that is addressed in this blog post as well. Uploading it to Google Docs was a beyond easy way for me to share this slideshow to anyone I want to online! What really interested me about this activity, however, was a chapter of the book "Beyond Bullet Points" by Cliff Atkinson. Who knew that the classic, bullet-pointed Powerpoint presentations I had been making for years are, in reality, totally ineffective! While I was somewhat saddened by this news, I was extremely happy to have learned this information before I'm actually in a class and boring my students.

Cliff discusses a rather "backward" approach to making a slideshow. While most of us probably make a slideshow completely from the Normal view option, Cliff suggests starting from the Slide Sorter view. He emphasizes the importance of the appearance of the slides and how "less is more" in the case of making presentations. He suggests that while in Slide Sorter view, the slides that are most important should be the ones your eyes are drawn to first. Once I thought about it, this completely made sense! The second trick that he teaches is using the Notes Page view to correlate your pictures and narration. This way, during a presentation, your slides don't have to be bullet points of every tidbit of information but simply the most important, elemental facts that you want people to remember. You may then write notes of what you would say during the presentation that not everyone has to see while the slideshow is running. The last tip that Cliff offers is using the Normal view to guide viewers through your slideshow. He suggests getting rid of tons of little extras such as the different transitions, sounds and animations and getting back to the basics with simple, generic pictures. Cliff believes that when you present a simple slideshow, people will pay closer attention to figure out what it's about.

After reading Cliff's article, I'm really going to try to employ his approach from here on out while making slideshows. I truly believe that his three tricks are totally effective and will not only keep my audience's attention, but also help them retain more information. Take a peek at the article and I guarantee you'll be entranced by these new ideas as well!