Since educators discovered Power Point as a content delivery tool in the classroom, many classes have had to endure more than one bad presentation. People in corporate settings probably have dreaded those slide presentations that seem to have no end. The blame is not only on bad slide design, the presenter may be guilty of making a bad presentation by not arranging the information in a way that delivers a clear idea, for example. I remember somebody telling me about the expression “Death by Power Point”, which addresses the bad choices presenters make while producing their slides.
Now with eLearning education it is more important than ever to make great slides because this may be the only way you will communicate with your students (asynchronous eLearning, for example). This post is not about how to design better slides, there are plenty of tutorials, videos, blog posts, seminars, webinars, and so on on the web to last you a lifetime. This post is about creating slides that communicate ideas to students you may not see at all during your course. Designing slides for eLearning requires more planning and instructional design than presentations for a sales pitch, for example.
With this in mind, Microsoft Office 365 has added new features to Power Point that can help instructors create presentations that may have content for eLearning. For example, they may contain multimedia and other interactive and visual elements for teaching online. As a suggestion, you can add your voice to a slide, when students play that slide you narration will start, you could synchronize your voice to animations which makes the presentation more engaging.
Although you may use bullet points (sparingly), Power Point now offers Smart Art that allows the organization of information on the slide that is visually appealing and provides a better vehicle to deliver the information to your audience. These objects are added through an interface that works as bullet points but uses graphic templates that present the information in a visual way. For example, if you want to explain a series of steps, you could use the various templates that help visually explain a process (the Process Smart Art option). You may add animations to help present each step of your process as you explain it.
If you would like to present a tutorial about a web application, you could use the screen recording feature, it allows the recording of your screen and your voice as you go through the tutorial, then the video is inserted on the slide, you can set the slide to play the video as soon as you land on the slide.
You still have available the options for embedding audio and video from external files (or embedding web videos from YouTube, for example). If you would like to add narration to your slide, you can record your voice using your computer microphone. My recommendation here is to devote some time to develop at least an outline of what you would like to say during the recording; of course it would be much better if you develop a scrip that you can add as notes under each slide. The idea behind a script is not only to focus your presentation but to keep the running time as low as possible, you don’t need to end up with a one hour slide presentation.
But the most interesting addition to Power Point is the recording of your presentation option. You can record your presentation to make it available as video or as a presentation with video and audio added. If you want, you could use your computer camera to record yourself during the presentation, you may turn it off if you need to record your voice only. It also records any animations and effects you integrate in the slides.
With all these options there is not doubt Power Point has become a contender in the eLearning development industry, along with other tools such as Articulate Presenter and Adobe plugins for Power Point. The best thing is that you don’t need to buy additional software for this. Now if they get into the program and add quizzing capabilities, they would indeed get the full attention of content developers and eLearning instructors.
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