background images for powerpoint presentation education

Whenever possible, we recommend avoiding the use of templates that are included with PowerPoint. For the most part, this has been shown to be an ineffective means to convey information (Garner and Alley, 2011). Upon opening PowerPoint, users are presented with standard templates with space to add a title at the top of the slide, and a block of text to add bullet points. The software itself does not provide any assistance. Excluding basic slides provided by publishing companies, instructors are given little guidance on what a PowerPoint presentation should look like. Needless to say, students were not impressed.įor the most part, graduate school does not train instructors how to properly use presentation software. To make matters worse, the instructor had the slide heavily animated-bullet points flew in, swirled around, and even made sound. The slide uses a template that makes the text difficult to read, there are several lengthy bullets, and the photos are too small. For example, Figure Figure1A 1A contains a slide that was prepared for a lecture in an introductory psychology course. Our slides used standard, boring templates were text heavy, and included grainy gif images-embarrassingly, some of which were even animated. The authors of this paper became interested in improving their PowerPoint slides after observing several presentations that badly misused PowerPoint, and realizing that they made many of the same mistakes. Strong PowerPoint presentations enhance student engagement and help students retain information (e.g., Susskind, 2005), while weak PowerPoint slides can lead to distraction, boredom, and impeded learning (Savoy et al., 2009). Academics typically only endure weak PowerPoint presentations at conferences, while university students may be exposed to them several times a day for an entire semester. Often to blame is the use and abuse of PowerPoint 1 (e.g., Tufte, 2003 Bumiller, 2010). There is nothing more frustrating than sitting through a presentation bombarded by slide after slide of small text, difficult to read graphs, irrelevant clip art images, and poorly designed templates.

Background images for powerpoint presentation education