Relative Advantage of Slide Presentations

I am a dedicated SMART Notebook guy so I may struggle with describing the relative advantage of slide presentations in my teaching as it has been years since I have used MS PowerPoint to build a lesson with. I do use it but that is because my department bought some presentations with awesome Flash animations embedded into them; the company is going HTML5 now!

I think Prezi is a cool program and my school bought a subscription last year for everyone; I didn't use it! I can't interact with it and I don't give presentations I do workshops and collaborative lessons. Don't get me wrong, I tell my students to use it 'til the hearts are content but they must follow my "Let's not make our audience sea-sick guidelines!". Mainly though, my students use it a a collaborative board for dropping into the notes and ideas the same way one might use Padlet.

As far as Google Slides goes, I don't use it to present to my students either but they like the way the slides give them a frame to write and present their work within, and so that they can build flash cards. I can share out a GSlide to my students using Andrew Stillman's Doctopus script and have the framework for their work built into it. Since I own the GSlides they are using, I can access them anytime I like and comment on their work as it progresses in a formative fashion or grade it when they are done.

It is interesting that we were assigned 25 slides to create for this task. The last time I did a presentation in public was during a Middle Leader's course. I had a lot of slides but they were built to the standards described in "Five ways to reduce PowerPoint overload" by Cliff Atkinson and Richard E. Mayer. Richard Mayer has published a lot of research on the the effects of presentation on learning during E-Instruction. What was interesting about the evaluation after my presentation was that the two coaches told me I should have had three slides maximum! Having 25 slides means I am standing in front of people and as the center of attention; I don't do this in class! I had the privilege of watching George Couros present his "The Networked Leader" keynote in Hong Kong at the 21CL Convention in December 2013. His presentation followed all the advice provided by Presentation Zen's Top Ten Slide Tips. The imagery completely supported George's keynote and made very emotional ties to what he was saying - he included very little text, the images were a pictorial representation of what he was talking about. Mayer's segmentation, coherence and redundancy principles all apply when it comes to instruction, but George wasn't trying to instruct, he was creating an emotional response and text on his slides were not necessary for that.

During school assemblies I have had to sit and watch presentations where students and teachers have put yellow text on a white background! Or white text over a bright blue and cloudy white sky! Rainbow coloured Word Art! It is painful. Death by PowerPoint or death by the incompetent presentation builder! My students try to do something similar in the GSlides I send them. They like to use all the coloured background templates; especially the Trek themed one that looks like the computers on Next Generation. The irony being that they don't even know that it is Star Trek. The theme is black and they proceed to drop white background images onto it. Some of them print them out and hand to me "Can you mark this Mr. Mullan?", "I can't, my pen won't write on all that black printer ink you have used...how's about I comment onto the GSlide like I said I would! And perhaps in future if you want to print, use the plain white template."



So for me, presentations need to be done right, for the right purpose and for the right audience. In class I will stick to my interactive software where I can get the students up to manipulate and draw. When I have to do an assembly, there will be very little text, beautiful images and me hopefully nowhere in sight with the microphone - they should be looking at the pics and listening not looking at me and listening, otherwise what is the point of the presentation?!