Presentations

=PowerPoint-less= A guide to computer graphics would be helpful since PowerPoint is a visual aid. Also, the "Blankslide document" gives a few tips on using the drawing toolbar.
 * Handouts**





Image and Sound Resources

PowerPoint has been around since 1987. That makes this technology application 20 years old. It may be surprising to find out (from [|wikipedia]) that it was originally a program that ran on the Apple Macintosh. Microsoft purchased the program from the original developers for $14 million. Since the 1990's, PowerPoint has been used as a presentation software by business people, teachers, and students. It's probably used in every school. Even by non-techy people, it's easy to use due to the features that Microsoft has put into the program to meet the needs of presenters and audiences.

This program is very easy to use, because it's "built for grownups". Kids of course, would be able to figure out what to do to create slides with images and text just by following the directions right on the screen. Children in every grade level can produce PowerPoint presentations for a variety of classes and for a variety of purposes. Along the way, students would learn the features of the program: animations, charts and graphs, sounds, embedding movies, and using the programs to create products other than presentations, such as picture books and scrapbooks.

Regardless of the fact that PowerPoint's use seems to be ubiquitous in business and educational, there is a great deal of criticism over the use of the program. Perhaps it started with [|Yale's Edward Tufte and his book PowerPoint is Evil]. Read the review from this link to get a sense of the major criticisms of PowerPoint. Basically, it's believed that most presentations created with PowerPoint are pretty awful. Even the creators, Rober Gaskins and Dennis Austin agree as told in [|an article in the Wall Street Journal].

The major complaints include:
 * The slides are used as "cue cards" for the presenter, not to help the audience understand the message
 * Poor layout and design due to the use of default templates make presentations hard to read or hideously boring
 * Ideas are are simplified into bulleted lists and stories are sometimes turned into a set of disparate facts
 * Every slideshow usually ends up looking like everyone else's

Don McMillan encapsulates every kind of mistake made by bad presenters. This movie is hilarious, but really gets the point across. I sent this to my husband last summer as he was struggling to complete a 60 slide presentation that was supposed to sum up his business to a set of investors. I'm sure his presentation didn't have any of these common mistakes. media type="youtube" key="HLpjrHzgSRM&rel=1" height="355" width="425" PowerPoint is meant to be a visual aid. A true visual is is VISUAL, not text - well actually, text can be a visual aid if it is specific and makes an important point. It's really a story-telling tool, as described by Dean Shareski in this presentation: media type="youtube" key="OC1OixM_118&rel=1" height="355" width="425"

For more information about the optimal use of PowerPoint, check out these two slideshows: media type="custom" key="464215"

media type="custom" key="492572"