Can your presentation stand on its own?
I’m in the middle of putting the finishing touches on a presentation that I’ll be doing on Wednesday afternoon about integrating widgets into unitedstreaming’s assignment builder and quiz builder. It occurred to me that like many of my other presentations, it will probably be almost completely worthless on its own. I always have people who ask me for my presentations, and I’m happy to pass them along. However, for the most part my presentations are little more than visuals to emphasize the things i’m speaking about. Take away the audio and you really just have a bunch of random images.
Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of text heavy PowerPoints. However, there is certainly one thing to be said for them, and that’s that they can be emailed to somebody else. Or they can be shared with something like Slideshare. They can stand on their own two legs, even without me being there.
So I guess my question is, is there actually two different skills we should be constructing here? Presentations that will be presented with a human voice, and ‘mute’ presentations?
Or is that question moot, considering how easy it is to create screencasts. And the real key is to create a screencast for every presentation, so THAT can be shared instead of just the PowerPoint.
What do you think? Is the art of creating a ‘mute’ PowerPoint worth teaching?
- Being there: A presentation that can really stand on its own
- SlideCasting – Another ‘cast, another virtual presentation
- If you buy it, they will learn.
- Podcasting vs. Lecture: Followup
- It’s not an assignment, it’s a creative brief
Paul Wilkinson
4/16/2007
http://paulwilkinson1.googlepages.com/powerpointlessnessessay.doc
This is the link to an essay I wrote a couple of years ago about this topic. To save you reading it the relevant point in my mind is that powerpoint has four (main) potential uses in school.
Created by the pupil
1. To support an oral presentation
2. To be a stand alone presentation viewed without the creator present.
Created by the teacher
3. To support an oral presentation
4. To be a stand alone presentation viewed without the creator present.
Each of these purposes is different and will result in completely different types of presentation. Teachers need to understand the differences and the issues involved in each type if they are to make the most of using powerpoint and more importantly help their students to make the most of powerpoint.
Kraemer
4/16/2007
Is the art of designing a web page worth teaching? Web pages are also often mute text based formats. (Thankfully this is no longer as true as it used to be!) I rarely use PowerPoint when I teach or present, but I often use it for other purposes like quick animation or tutorials. Most of my presentations as a teacher stand alone.
My students are currently a little inexperienced to be designing web sites. Instead we are using presentation software to design interactive presentations that will be posted online when they are finished. Next year I plan to use this activity to transition into web design which is another form that must stand alone. My students seem delighted and challenged to be required to say all they need to without being present, and they are learning a great deal about the value of good writing skills.
Jane Perzyk
4/16/2007
Presentations such as Karl Fisch’s viral “Did You Know?,” (http://lessig.org/freeculture/free.html)in its simple white text on black background format, can serve as a stand alone and a wonderful conversation starter. Lawrence Lessig’s PowerPoints, on the other hand, (http://lessig.org/freeculture/free.html) in a similar format (different font) serve only as a reference point for Lessig’s narrative. Both are dramatic and effective in their own way, but serve different purposes.
In our MI-LIFE program, we do PowerPoint presentations marketing our soon-to-be-launched curriculum and are frequently asked for digital copies of the file for those who are absent. In view of that, we try to make our slides as informative as possible. For these types of presentations, the trick, IMHO, is to put just enough information on the slides to satisfy absent readers but to avoid the appearance of the presenter actually reading from the slides.
For those who think they might be relying too heavily on PowerPoints, why not start a withdrawal program? In slideshow mode, hit the “B” key on your computer so the screen will go black, and force yourself to continue talking without the PowerPoint Prop for several minutes!
Mrs. Durff
4/17/2007
There are two animals involved here…the return to it and mull over kind of posted presentation and the I am here so make it worth my time kind of presentation. I like both and find both have their place. I liked your online resume presentations, both kinds, and borrowed heavily when presenting these ideas to high school students who just want to get the year over with…..
Danielle Abernethy
4/17/2007
Steve, I posted about this topic a few weeks ago. There is a piece of software called ProfCast that will record your audio and your slides. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s a start.
Floyd Geasland
4/17/2007
I don’t think “presentation PowerPoints” (or any other presentation software) should stand alone separate from the human who is presenting. In my middle school class on presentations I teach that they are giving the audience the information not the PowerPoint. As you mentioned the visuals are there to reinforce what you are saying. Too many young speakers just want to use PowerPoints as visual notes everyone can read. If I come to a presentation I want hear the speaker’s expertise, especially in response to questions from the audience, this cannot be given by the PowerPoint. I can look at tech files any day that give me information, but even conversing back and forth in e-mails or blogs does not generate the ideas/energy attending a human presentation with the the interaction with between speaker and audience that is possible. The best ‘presentations’ feed off of the audience.
Delivering information via PowerPoints can be useful because you can time each slide to your audience’s attention span. But these are not presentations, they are merely fancy books with automatic page turners. They have a purpose and they fill a need, but no one should consider them true presentations.
As far as recording a real presentation with your software there is the free Microsoft Windows Media Encoder. As with all free software it has its bugs and the more memory your machine has the better it does its job. I have used it a couple of times for presentations I do in class and most recorded well after I learned to avoid some problems caused by settings.
Nancy Sharoff
4/17/2007
Stick w/ the PowerPoints. They are there to visually support what you are sharing in the webinar. HOWEVER… (and that’s a BIG ‘however’) having attended a number of the webinars I find myself frantically either jotting or typing the information so that I can refer to it at a later point in time. Having access to the PowerPoint slides in the future is useless unless there’s the content to go w/ them. Being a visual rather than auditory learner I’m also not that keen on having a screencast w/ audio. I would prefer a document that has some of the slides w/ the related step-by-step instructions (or urls to the websites) that I can keep on my computer or print out and refer to at a later point in time.
PowerPoint was never meant to replace the presenter (and ESPECIALLY not you Steve! LOL), but considering the wealth of information shared during these sessions it would be beneficial to arrive at a solution for those who were able to attend the webinar, but couldn’t jot/type fast enough.
Thanks….and knowing you, you’ll have the remedy within the hour!
Dale Basler
4/18/2007
How strange… I just wrote something similar
Recent research on cognitive load theory suggests that PowerPoint is doing more damage than good…[
read more]
Dale Basler
4/18/2007
Is the art of creating a ‘mute’ PowerPoint worth teaching?
Yes. But don’t call it a presentation. Its a screencast.
Presentations can be done (gulp) without PPT.
Andrew Pass
4/19/2007
Steve, I’m not sure that we should only approach this question from the perspective of the quality of the presentation, for the audience, itself. The process of creating a power point presenation teaches students to think, just as the process of writing teaches students to think.
Since, our students are not professional presenters, I don’t even have much of a problem if they read from a power point that they’ve create, assuming that the purpose of the activity is to convey a message. If the purpose of the activity is to develop presentation skills, then I do have a problem.
The most important question is “What’s the objective of the activity?”
[...] In response to Steve Dembos post on teach42 can your presentation stand on its own?, and a recent announcement that Google will soon unveil a powerpoint clone, I thought it might be relevant to look into the research on using powerpoint. [...]
Ray
4/22/2007
“Mute” PowerPoints have their place in education. Like everything we do in education, the objectives determine what our students need to learn. The other items just support the ideas necessary to navigate our students to complete the task. “Mute” PowerPoints, or PowerPoints without the presenter are often hard to understand when audio of what is being presented is missing. In response to some of the other posts, I believe that stand-alone PowerPoints are just as important as mute PowerPoints, for the simple reason of absent students. Students who are absent during a presentation often miss out on some important information. Why not have that information readily available for those students who are not able to attend school that day? Why not PowerPoint presentation available for those days that you as the teacher are absent? Imagine the possibilities and tasks that could be completed when students and teachers are absent. Classroom instruction could continue even with a substitute, as if you were there!!
[...] blogged a little bit about whether PowerPoints should be able to stand on their own, whether they are just there to support the presenter (and to be honest, the comments from everyone [...]
Laura MacDonald
3/5/2008
Hi Steve
I had this ahah! some time ago when preparing for a face to face presentation. I was asked to distribute powerpoint handouts of my presentation and I choose not to share my presentation, not because I don’t like to share, but because I had designed the powerpoint to support my face to face presentation, not to stand alone.
There is also the whole synchronous online training. In synchronous online training the presentation slides are designed to support your instruction, but because the audience can’t see your face, you design many more slides because otherwise the audience is staring at the same slide for too long.So as far as I’m concerned there is the face to face presentation slides, stand alone presentation slides and online teaching slides.
Online Teaching
11/3/2009
Thanks, I like this post it is very good and informative. I am sure that this post will be very helpful
Raiders Trivia
11/3/2009
amazing that Powerpoint, with all its shortcomings is still the “presentation leader”…
Online State University
11/3/2009
Very good articles and I am also interested in that, please give some more details.
Online MBA Program
11/7/2009
I am very interested to continue my further education in Online Studies so please send me the details description of all courses.
normal rockwell trivia
11/7/2009
Slideshare is definitely the way to go.
norman rockwell trivia
11/7/2009
Slideshare sometimes works with widgets, but sometimes not.
Online MBA
11/8/2009
Wow I Get very good news from these articles, and the University conduct variant different courses
Online Degrees
12/8/2009
Good advice. We often advise our students to take a step back and understand what they are getting into. This article reinforces that concept with some practical advice.
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