Jason Young at eXtension posted a link on the Extension Tech listerve to an interesting site by Garr Reynolds about presentation skills and graphics. Moving around the site I found this excellent page called Top Ten Slide Tips for power point. I found it to be very good and worthwhile for Extension professionals. We tend to use power point slides as our teaching plan organizers, putting most of items we want to cover into the slides. It makes our teaching job easier, but at the expense of our audience. Slide after slide just full of bullet points.
For a good audio podcast that has similar themes, check out one of last year’s Manager Tools podcasts: it focuses on using power point. Good stuff to listen to while out driving or working out. An overall message from both sources: put less stuff in the slides and more into a separate handout. We all too often use the slides as both the visual presentation medium and the handout.
I’m guilty of what I’m critiquing. It’s way too easy to simply open a slide and start writing stuff. Then I print the whole thing out and make copies. Time for me to work on improving that practice.