Light Bites course (attended Wednesday 31st October 2018) Addressing how to ensure PowerPoint presentations are engaging for the audience and fit for purpose – to benefit learning

TedX talk – How to avoid Death by PowerPoint: https://youtu.be/Iwpi1Lm6dFo

5 Key Principles to consider when developing a PowerPoint presentation:

• Keep to only 1 message per slide – Helps ensure focus to the key point
• Reduce text to ensure the slide is not too wordy – Accompany text with image which clearly anchors to the point of the slide
• Use a smaller font size for the slide heading and larger font size for the most important information – otherwise eyes will focus on the headline rather than the content.
• Contrast (consider background and text in relation to the surroundings – if the background colour is too bright it will distract from the content) Highlight text to focus attention (fade in) and dim other text to limit area of focus. The PowerPoint slides should be used as a visual aid to assist a presentation rather than the entire focus of the presentation.
• Limit what can be seen on screen to 6 items (linked to cognitive counting – we can see up to 6 items / beyond 6 we start to count which takes time and distracts from the message)

Important to remember – The amount of slides is not the problem / The amount of objects per slide is the problem

I found this session quite useful as a reminder to consider how PowerPoint slides can be more / less effective. The session was quite surface level and did not cover instructional design principles in more detail – However, issues such as SEN compliance / the benefits of working on a 16:9 template rather than 4:3 were discussed in groups during the session.

Further information about the session can be found here