I have seen some ugly PowerPoint slides and anticipate that I have not seen my last bad PowerPoint presentation. I am not a huge fan of PowerPoint and try to use other software, or build a web page, to be the visual aspect of my presentation. I do not want to dismiss PowerPoint alltogether and think it has some redeeming qualities. Sometimes I try to learn a better way to present with PowerPoint and try to upgrage it to something my audience wants to look at.
This module, and your assignment, is going to focus on the design of PowerPoint slides, which I believe is the most important part of using PowerPoint. I am guessing, like Microsoft Word, that you have some experience with PowerPoint. If you are not famililar with this software, do not worry. Here are some resources to get you up to speed on this software:
The following presentation covers the basics of how to use the tools in PowerPoint.
This presentation also covers the basics of PowerPoint.
This presentation shows you how to add animations to your PowerPoint slides.
I have been asked to present on how to use PowerPoint effectively to many different groups. I ended up presenting it so many times that I created an interactive web page where you can click through some bad examples and how you might go about fixing them. I encourage you to go through this presentation and take the short quiz at the end of the presentation to see how well you understood the concepts that were presentation.
The next step is to try out what you learned about PowerPoint design. Using the basics of PowerPoint videos and the PowerPoint design interactive, I want you to take some poorly designed slides and upgrade them. These slides were my lecture notes for a program development course I taught back in the professor days. I went through the slides and made them super ugly! So your job is to fix them. I want you to fix the obvious issues as well as add a pleasant cohesive design using the text in the slides. You are welcome to be creative, add pictures, add animations, and have fun.