Monday, March 22, 2010

What I hate about powerpoint...

After attending many conferences recently and presenting in class myself I'm noticing a trend in powerpoints and presentations that are a little scary to me. Presenters and lecturers are getting boring....

Reading up on power point I have come across some REALLY funny thoughts on this topic and adapted some rules that I'm publishing simply for my own benefit. I want to publish these so that I can be better at presenting information to a group. SO hold me to these, make sure I don't do them and have some fun with the rules. Comment away, add more rules for me to follow:

What I hate about power point adapted from: http://jeremyharmer.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/10-things-i-hate-about-powerpoint/


1 Powerpoint as lecture notes
Make it interesting don’t use the power point and stare at your power point while you talk. If you don’t know what yu are going to say, maybe you shouldn’t be the one saying it…

2 Visual assault
“Pictures, flashes, whizzy entrances, funny faces. It can all get far far too much. I’ll need to re-evaluate what I do with pictures and animation.”

3 Aural assault
“Thwack! Zing! Bzzzz! Kerpow! Wow. Is it too much?”

4 Bullet points
“If I never see another bullet point again I will be
• Happy
• Relieved
• Surprised
They’re everywhere in Microsoft’s Powerpoint template and they screw up the hierarchy of information. And they’re boring.”

5 Powerpoint backgrounds
Don’t use the ones given to you, find some of your own. Or better yet, use black or white and use the imags on the screen as the excitement. Think about an Art Museum, what colors are the walls? WHITE! Why? TO NOT TAKE AWAY FORM THE ART!

6 Early closing
“Leave the last screen up there until people have left the room. It’s good manners.”

7 Lecturers who stand in front of the projector
Just don’t do it..

8 Lecturers who are stuck to the computer
Get out, walk around be yourself. Unless you are boring then be someone else…

9 Technology experts

“fitting the technology to the child, not the child to the technology as the British academic Susan Greenfield said in the House of Lords (Britain’s second legislative chamber) the other day.”

Basically don’t make this overcomplicated or try to WOW the crowd unless you are giving a presentation on WOWing. Keep t simple and not distracting.


10 Technology failure
Prepare for it and have a back up plan in case your powerpoint doexn’t work.


My Final thoughts...

If you are like me….be creative with your presentation, and censor those around you (namely me) to not be too creative. Don’t limit yourself to power point there are a lot of great resources out there that will get your point across too. In fact some of the best presentations I’ve seen was someone simply flipping through their Flickr images. Think about it!

Great video!


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