Effective use of PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is used widely as a presentation tool to provide students with multimedia slides to complement the delivery of educational material.
Why?
PowerPoint can be a valuable tool, whether you are delivering face to face or creating video-based course content. The most effective use of PowerPoint will vary depending on the delivery mode.
In a synchronous context, summarised content may be presented on the slides, while you provide an expanded explanation and dialogical examples.
In an asynchronous context, the students may navigate through the slides at their own pace. Slides can include graphics, narration, or video to support student learning.
The benefits of using PowerPoint to support your lessons include:
- Easy to use – simple user interface with a vast number of preset slide types and designs, such as the UOW template.
- Visual – great way to complement presentations with visuals and summarised ideas for ease of audience consumption and understanding.
- Multimodal – slides can incorporate text, images, audio (pre-existing or recorded directly), video and animated elements to further create meaning and understanding.
- Flexible – can cover a variety of content forms, from quickly brainstorming ideas collaboratively to creating engaging standalone learning packages.
- Exportable – presentation can be exported in several ways including note-taking printouts, video files and images.
- Access – as part of the Microsoft Office suite of offerings, PowerPoint is available to all UOW staff and students.
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Accessible – PowerPoint has a built-in accessibility checker to ensure presentations are accessible.
How?
Tips for effective use of PowerPoint
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Keep slides simple so students can easily make connections between the presenter and the presentation.
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Use limited text. Think bullet points, quotes, and key statistics. Not whole sentences.
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Talk to the slides, rather than having the audience read them. Remember that PowerPoint is used to support delivery, not replace it.
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Use relevant images that support the message.
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Align content on slide (e.g., headings, text, images) to provide a visual hierarchy of information.
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Remove unnecessary information.
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Limit the use of animations. Only use animated elements to show context and understanding, not for decorative effect.
Making PowerPoint accessible
All Microsoft Office programs have a built-in Accessibility Checker to assist in knowing what to look for and how to fix accessibility issues in your content that may not be obvious from a visual inspection.
PowerPoint also contains a Reading Order panel, which displays what order a screen reader would convey the information on the slides. These relatively short checks before exporting can be the difference between a student being able to access and interact with your learning experiences or not.
Step-by-step guides on how to access and utilise these tools are available through Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities, a support resource suite developed by Microsoft.
PowerPoint can be used in a variety of creative ways. These include:
- Annotation: adding a blank slide in your presentation as a place to demonstrate a question, process, or workflow can be beneficial in a recorded presentation. Highlighting text elements or directing focus to specific parts of a content slide can also be effective.
- Storyboard: create a video storyboard or module plan to visualise structure, dialogue, content, and alignment.
- Branching scenarios: PowerPoint can be used as an authoring tool, providing students with an interactive learning package.
- UI prototypes: create example prototypes and user interface designs using familiar tools within PowerPoint
- Infographics/research posters: create infographics or research posters for printing or display.
PowerPoint can be used for a wide variety of different purposes, however, that doesn’t mean that it is the most appropriate tool for every use case.
When considering the use of PowerPoint, ask yourself if it is fit for purpose, do not base your decision solely on its convenience and familiarity.
Related information
- Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities | External resource
- Water Bear Learning provides a helpful resource summary of the principles with examples of each.
- This TEDx presentation by David Phillips titled “How to avoid death by PowerPoint” provides some great tips, examples underpinned by learning theories.
- Teaching with PowerPoint | External resource
