Notes on How I Made My Presentations a Little Better

This article is written by Merlin Mann on the 23rd of August 2007. The name of this article is How I made my presentations a little better. In this article, Mann talks about how he still has a long way to go and none of his suggestions are professional and that he has learned from a lot of experts. Later on, he explains that if you have trouble with your visuals, it might be good for you to use Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule, which is a rule that says a PowerPoint presentation should only have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. IStockPhoto is a search engine where you can find inexpensive images to licence for presentations. Their search engine gets interesting images and is good. Some of the things that you have to do in order to give a nice presentation include clearing your throat as little as possible when you start. You must try to open the presentation with something that connects with your audience or something to do with the real world. An image or an anecdote would be a good start- something to capture the audience’s attention. Another thing is that try to have as less as possible words on your slides. Try to use big fonts and make the information on each slide as simple as possible. You should also consider showing images and text that make an orthogonal point to what you are saying aloud to the audience at that moment. Allow the audience to understand it without you helping them. Another thing you should always do is finish early. If you finish late, what that shows is that you did not spend time preparing yourself to give the speech in this amount of time. The audience might also get bored if you just keep on going. The most important reason to finish early is so that you have enough time to take any questions. You should always help audience with anything they don’t understand.

Summary of "The Science of PowerPoint Overload"

This article is written by Cliff Atkinson and it is titled The Science of PowerPoint Overload. In this article he talks about ways PowerPoint can be used wisely. Later on in the article, Atkinson talks about how Richard E. Mayer of the University of California wrote some ways to explain how you can use PowerPoint correctly. One of the things he says if your slides only contain words, add some more pictures to it to make it more interesting. You should also change the words in the PowerPoint from the words you speak so PowerPoint only reinforces what you say. You should also stay away from loads of information on slides, make it simple. There are others and these are really useful tips for making better PowerPoints.

Summary of Help! My brain is overloaded!

This article has some quotes from John Sweller, from the School of Education. This article was published on 23rd March 2007, and its name is Help! My brain is overloaded. This article talks about the human brain and how much information is considered overloaded. The human brain can usually hold three to four items at the same time remembering them for three to four seconds without rehearsal. Almost all the information we get goes after 20 seconds unless there is rehearsal. Working memory is only limited when you learn new things though. PowerPoint presentations can backfire the information because the audience’s attention will be split in two.

Seth's Blog Summary

This is an article written by Seth Godin, and the name of the article is Really Bad PowerPoint. In this article, Godin points out that PowerPoint was designed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department-and vice versa. PowerPoint is not the best tool on your computer because people use it the way that Microsoft wants them to use it, instead of the right way. One very important thing is don’t hand out your handouts before the presentation because then the audience will read it and ignore you. Don’t have more than six words per slide. Allow the slide to reinforce what you want to say, not replace it.

Response to Han's "PowerPoint Articles Summary"

That is quite a good summary about the PowerPoint Hanniboy. You really did pick up a lot of detail and nice job with always listing the author of the article you read and also mentioning the name of the article in quotation marks. I like how you did not just put in extra useless words to make 300 words, instead you really wrote what you thought. The only thing I would say is that in the last sentence, it seemed that you still had a big portion to cover about the guy defending PowerPoint but you summarized in one sentence he made fun of PowerPoint. Maybe you could organize your paragraph to explain all things equally next time.

Assignment #3

I think that for the most part, Microsoft PowerPoint is used well. PowerPoint is usually used in learning/teaching-connected purposes. I think it is used well because most people use it to do presentations, I mean no one really plays around with PowerPoint because it is not that much fun. Students all around the world probably at some point in time, have to use PowerPoint to do some presentation for their classes. Most teachers know what a bad PowerPoint and what a good PowerPoint is so this must force the students to use it correctly. The only places people use it badly may be at job-related presentations where their goal is to get the most information on slides with graphs and all other data. This is what makes PowerPoint boring and abusing the use of Microsoft PowerPoint. In one of the former articles I read, is gives an example of a PowerPoint presentation that the Corporation NASA gives for some presentation to show lots of data and information. I would basically keep everything in PowerPoint because you actually can use everything in a good way appropriate to the situation. If I was teaching a class, I would definitely use PowerPoint. I would use PowerPoint because I think it is a great way of teaching. I say this because in one of the former articles I read, there was an explanation to why PowerPoint makes you think better. When you read short bullet-pointed data like on PowerPoint, too much information is not given, forcing you to think more about and in doing so, thinking for yourself. If you were reading a paragraph off the slide, you would read it but it wont make you think as much as reading bullet points and you would forget it more easily because it is too much information for the brain at once. If I were a teacher, I would want my students to learn and think for themselves. Therefore, I would use Microsoft PowerPoint.

New My Blog

These articles are also talking about whether or not PowerPoint is good or bad. One of the guys that are writing this article claims that PowerPoint is bad, and he explains it in his article. The other guy, defends PowerPoint, finding faults with the guy against PowerPoint, he has all this in his article. The girst article is about the guy who is against PowerPoint. He says that PowerPoint is bad because he thinks that people learn more when they are graphs, which include loads of data. He says the example of the incident with the NASA project wher the guys presented their slides, which had very much writing in it that no one could even understand it. He says that the bullet point way of presenting information is not smart and it was encouraged by PowerPoint. He also says that when you add animation and other colours and stuff, it making the presentation ridiculous and you are distracting the readers. Now, the guy who is defending PowerPoint has a lot of good points that he makes. Some of the things he said are that the guy, who is oppsoing PowerPoint, is wrong because he says that the people dont necessarily learn when they have huge amounts of data like huge graphs thrown at them. He says that PowerPoint is not the first source of teaching that using the bullet points for presenting information. He says that people used bullet points even before computers were invented on boars and paper and other things. He is really right. He also says that the design you give to a PowerPoint, the other guy calling it distractions, are actually good beacuse it stops boredom in the pwople and grabs their attention. He says that people learn better with bullet points because if they were to read paragraph, they would read it and think over but not really process any of that information in their minds. When people read a presentation that consists of bullet points, they read the bullet points and they think more on the subject because not much information is given about it. In doing so, they learn better because they are thinking more deeply into it. I agree with what the good guy says. He also says it is not that PowerPoint is bad, bu the people use it badly, I agree.