Aug

5

Designing Effective Slides Using PowerPoint

August 5, 2006 | |

I’m on a bit of a visuals kick at the moment. I’m updating one of my workshops so have been researching information. Expect a few entries on this topic! Here’s the first good resource I’ve found.

ECG is a company in New York that publishes a client newsletter providing insight into key communication issues. They have an excellent series of Communication Skills Articles.

One of particular interest - that has major implications for videoconferencing - is Creating Visual Aids That Really Work

In their words:
Used wisely, PowerPoint® and similar programs can be an effective tool to help audiences remember your message, while allowing you to prove, reinforce, and support your claims.
Used unwisely, PowerPoint becomes a distraction that upstages the presenter and buries the message. With its tumbling, whooshing, flying, singing and screeching graphics, PowerPoint can take on a life of its own.

Hear!!! Hear!!!

Topics covered are:

  • Use Visuals Wisely
  • Use Color Wisely
  • Use Fonts Wisely
  • Animation
  • Charts/Graphs

You’ll find stacks of other related articles in the archives of their Total Communicator.


Comments

Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)

1 Comment so far

  1.    Jillian Litster on August 25, 2006 1:53 am

    Hi Carol,
    Thanks for the link to this site, and also for your training sessions that I have attended over the years. There is always new information and new techniques to pick up on and it is also nice to reaffirm at times that what I am doing is correct according to ‘the professionals’. As you know I am always on a visual kick (most recently with videos as well as powerpoint).
    Just one tip I would like to add to the hints above: Remember to maintain the internal consistency of font styles in a presentation. Whilst most of us remember to stick with one font style when putting together a single presentation (to be honest I used to be a bit unreliable in this area), sometimes if we are constructing a series of weekly presentations we may alternate styles. Given that more and more material is being archived and provided online in ‘packages’ this variation starts to become noticable. It is a wise idea, if creating a series of PowerPoint slide resources, to keep the font style consistent across the entire series.

Name

Email

Website

Speak your mind

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture.
Anti-Spam Image