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=Ed Tech Presentation: Beyond PowerPoint=

Welcome
Hello and welcome to this brief lecture on PowerPoint Presentations. This lecture will help you get on track with creating a great PowerPoint presentation. The information provided here is intended to get you started on designing your own PowerPoint Presentation.

Keep Things Brief
Too much text on any one slide can overwhelm your audience, try to limit what you post on each slide and stick to key points. Too much information at once can turn people away from your presentation.

Use Images When Appropriate
It is always a good idea to use images in the presentation, but make sure that they serve a purpose. Simply posting pictures all over the place will distract your audience. While it is okay to add some images for humor as well, make sure that you do not plaster them all over your presentation.

Make sure that the text is easy to read
Make the text as large as possible for your slides, and that the text is easy to read. People argue as to what the best size for any slide should be, so use your best judgment. Just do your best to make sure that it does not fall below 18 point font.

Contrast
One of the most important things about creating PowerPoint presentations is to make sure that the text contrasts enough with the background so that it is easy to read. Numerous PowerPoint presentations lose their impact when the slides cannot be easily read by the audience even if they can be easily read on the creator's computer.Which of these do you think is easier to read?



The slides must flow properly
One should make sure that the presentation flows properly. This can be done in a manner of ways, including having the same font style, color, lines, or icons. Having numerous elements changing from slide-to-slide can actually do more harm than good, and can end distracting the audience from what is being explained.Having different colors and fonts on each slide can be distracting, such as what is seen in these slides:

Make sure that the images have a purpose
It is also important that items on each page in the PowerPoint should be visually connected to something else on the page. Everything that is placed in the page should be placed there for a reason, not simply to add something else to the page.These slides have images that do not convey the text properly. While they may relate to the text, the images do not relate to what is being said:

Limit what you put on each slide
It is important to limit the number of visual aids because while they can catch the viewer's attention, they also risk distracting the viewers from the message the presentation is trying to get across. At times like this, I am reminded of a famous quote by Mark Twain, "Sorry about the length of this letter, if I had more time I would have made it shorter."Here are some examples from an early draft of a Judaism PowerPoint: These slides have so much content on them, that no one will learn anything from the slides:

Always preview your presentation before presenting it officially
Just because it looks good on your computer does not mean that it will look good when being presented. If you are presenting it through a web tool, check to see how it looks on the web tool long before you are going to present it. Practice your presentation by doing recordings to see how it looks and sounds. If you are presenting it in an auditorium, see how it looks on the overhead before the day of the presentation.

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PowerPoint Presentation
Here is the PowerPoint Presentation that I used to explain Beyond PowerPoint. media type="custom" key="14030222"

Update PowerPoint
Here are the before and after of the Gandhi and WWII Propaganda slides:

media type="custom" key="10988582" media type="custom" key="10988590"

media type="custom" key="10988614" media type="custom" key="10988616"

Presentation Tools Examples
Example 1: Slideshare media type="custom" key="14039566" Example 2: Authorstream media type="custom" key="14039464" Example 3: Jing media type="custom" key="14039536"

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