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Improve Your Digital Presentation Skills

  1. Plan your presentation
  2. One thing at a time – Bullet points can be revealed one at a time as you reach them. Your job as a teacher is to control the flow of information so that you and your students are synchronised throughout.
  3. No Paragraphs – Your slides are the illustrations for your lesson, not the notes themselves. They should underline and reinforce what you’re saying as you give your presentation.
  4. Pay attention to design – Avoid the temptation to dress up your pages with cheesy effects and focus instead on simple design basics:
  • Use Arial, Helvetica, or Calibri font for body text. These fonts tend to be the easiest to read on screens.
  • Use decorative fonts only for slide headers, and then only if they’re easy to read. Decorative fonts are hard to read and should be reserved only for large headlines at the top of the page. Stick to a classy serif font like Georgia or Baskerville.
  • Put dark text on a light background. Again, this is easiest to read. If you must use a dark background make sure your text is quite light (white, cream, light grey, or pastels) and maybe bump the font size up two or three notches.
  • Align text left or right. Centred text is harder to read and looks amateurish. Line up all your text to a right-hand or left-hand baseline – it will look better and be easier to follow.
  • Avoid clutter. A headline, a few bullet points, maybe an image – anything more than that and you risk losing your audience as they sort it all out.
  1. Think outside the screen – The slides on the screen are only part of the presentation – and not the main part.
  2. Have a hook – Open with something surprising or intriguing, something that will get your students to become alert and interested.
  3. Keep it simple – Only use one or two text colours, one or two font styles and one or two animation or transition effects. Use sound effects sparingly and make sure they are relevant.

References:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/10-tips-for-more-effective-powerpoint-presentations.html

https://www.sddu.leeds.ac.uk/online_resources/ppt/good-practice_in.htm

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