Tag: slide shows

In the first part of this practical guide, we discussed the potential of stand-alone slide presentations as a tool for learning. In the second installment, we looked at the visual element in the presentation – the slides. This time we look at the auditory component – the narration.

Packaging up a live presentation

The way you approach the narration will depend on whether you are (1) packaging up a presentation that you have previously delivered live, or (2) creating a stand-alone slide show from scratch. In the case of the former, the presentation will most likely represent you and your perspective on the topic in hand – you will want to record the voiceover yourself and retain as much of the personality of the original presentation as possible. That means keeping it natural and informal. Assuming you didn’t read from a script when you presented live (and let’s hope that’s the case), then you won’t want to read from a script now. Try to capture the buzz of the live presentation by imagining you are presenting to a live audience. Or why not record it live? You can always edit it down afterwards to remove any superfluous elements.

Designing specifically for stand-alone use

On the other hand, you may be designing a slide show that will only ever be used as a piece of learning content. It is not intended as a personal statement and it won’t be attributed to you. In this case you are almost definitely best off writing a script and you should seriously consider using a professional voiceover artist to deliver this. Why? Because professional voiceover artists are very good at reading a script so it doesn’t sound like they’re reading a script. By and large, the rest of us aren’t.

Script for speaking

When scripting, it’s hard to avoid slipping into report writing mode. Keep reminding yourself that the words you are writing will be read aloud, not read from the screen. Try saying the words out loud yourself and keep revising them until you can put them across effortlessly.

Use a conversational tone

Whatever you do, avoid ‘corporate drone’. Write as you would speak. That means short sentences, simple language, the active voice (“The cat ate the mouse” not “The mouse was eaten by the cat”), and a free use of contractions (“I can’t remember …” not “I cannot remember …”). You can also help the voiceover artist by making absolutely clear (perhaps in bold type) which words need special emphasis.

Don’t duplicate your voiceover as on-screen text

Your learner’s brain can cope with one verbal channel (in this case the voiceover) but not two. If words are coming at you from two places at once, you’ll just overload. If absolutely necessary, emphasise key points and headings with on-screen text, but please don’t display your script verbatim.
Coming next: distribution

In the first part of this practical guide, we reviewed the capabilities of, and applications for, packaged slide presentations as a tool for learning. In this second installment, we look in more detail at the visual element in the presentation – the slides. Next time we’ll examine the best ways to go about recording a narration.

What your slides must achieve

If your slide show is going to be packaged with an audio narration, then your slides have very much the same function as they would do in a live presentation – they convey the visual element, while a voice delivers the words. In this context, slides are visual aids. With photographs, illustrations, diagrams and charts, they capture the viewer’s attention, clarify meaning and improve retention. With the sparing use of on-screen text, they can also help to reinforce key elements of the verbal content, but the prime purpose is always visual.
Without narration, your slides have to accomplish both roles – the visual and the verbal. In this respect they need a very different design focus to a live presentation. Take the following example of a slide taken from a live presentation that was converted to stand alone, without narration, on slideshare.net. A section of the slide has been allocated to a running textual commentary, essentially a much simplified version of the original presenter’s words:

Not that this is the only way of displaying the verbal content. If, rather than converting a live presentation, you were designing a stand-alone and un-narrated slide show from scratch, you could use all sorts of devices to display the words, like the speech bubbles used in this example:

Another consideration is the distance from which your slides will be viewed. In a live presentation, your audience is likely to be some way from the screen, whereas when the slides are used for self-study, they will be up close. Whether this matters depends on the device the audience will be using to view the presentation (this could be anything from a smart phone to a large PC monitor) and the size of the window in which your presentation will be displayed. You may be able to get away with displaying more detail than you would when live, but this needs testing.

An argument for imagery

Only an expert wordsmith can conjure up with words what a person, object or event actually looks like. Only an expert teacher can explain a concept or process clearly using words alone. And only a wonderful presenter can make a lasting impact on an audience without the use of imagery. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth ten thousand words”. Pictures show, quite effortlessly, what things really look like. They clarify concepts and processes. They stick in the memory. All you have to do is use them.

Pictures come in a variety of forms to suit different situations. Photographs portray what things look like; diagrams clarify concepts and processes; illustrations make the abstract more memorable. Presentation software such as PowerPoint makes it easy to employ pictures in all these forms. Your task is to avoid the lazy option – clip art – and to find the picture that really does tell a story.

Break the mould

It’s all too simple to use the standard templates provided by your presentation software, but these won’t always do justice to your images. Take these two examples:

You can definitely do without the slide junk – the logos, headers and footers that appear on every slide. There’s a place for your logo and that’s on the title slide (OK and maybe at the end as well). And you don’t really need all that clutter at the bottom of each slide – you’re producing slides, remember, not a report.

Text is also OK in moderation
You’ve probably heard of the expression “death by PowerPoint”. You’ve probably experienced it.

Yes, we’ve all been there, and yet we put up with it – see The Emperor’s New Slide Show.
Well, by far the biggest complaint you will hear from presentation audiences is that the slides contain too much text. In his book The Great Presentation Scandal, John Townsend relates how he counted the number of words and figures on every slide at a conference he was attending. The overall average was 76. That’s right, 76.

Given this, you may find it surprising that we could be recommending the use of text as a visual aid when the real problem is that there’s far too much of it. This is a fair point, but text can be useful as a visual aid, when you need to highlight the start of a new section, emphasise a key point, list a number of related points or present data in the form of a table.
If you do keep the amount of text on your slides to a minimum, it will have that much more impact when it does appear; particularly if you know when to use it and how to lay it out like the professionals. If you obey a few simple guidelines, that’s what you will achieve.

Use your slides to tell a story

A presentation is much more than a collection of independent thoughts accompanied by visual aids – however interesting the thoughts and however brilliant the visuals. Just like a novel, a radio play or a film, it has a beginning, an end and a carefully planned route in between.
Too many presentations look like they have been constructed by simply extracting slides from previous presentations. Although re-using slides is fine, if they are appropriate to the task in hand, this is never going to be enough to do the job. Like a film director, you have to look at the big picture, using words and images to manipulate your audience’s attention and their emotions. There is no black art to this; you just need a little imagination and a simple structure.
Coming next: the narration

In a learning context, slides have traditionally been used as ‘speaker support’ – visual aids to support live presentations. However, slide shows produced using Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote also provide a useful way to deliver packaged content for self-directed learning. This practical guide explores the potential for packaged slide shows as a learning tool and describes the many ways in which these can be developed and deployed.

Media elements

A slide show can incorporate all major media elements. Although the dominant forms are always likely to be still images and text, presentation software also makes it possible to animate the text and images on slides, as well as to import audio and video.

Interactive capability

As we shall see, there are many ways of distributing slide shows. Many of these are essentially passive – you watch the slide show as you would a video. Although some formats – including native PowerPoint – have the potential for quite sophisticated interactivity, this is not the normal use of packaged slide shows and we will not be examining this application in any detail in this practical guide.
As passive media, the use of packaged slide shows is largely limited to the following learning strategies:
Exposition – required viewing as part of a set curriculum
Exploration – as developmental material for use by learners at their own discretion
Slide shows could also act as supporting material within other strategies – instruction and guided discovery – but only as one element in a blend.

Applications

While limited in terms of interactive capability, slide shows have a great many applications. Even without narration, they can provide a visually-dynamic and engaging way to present relatively small chunks of learning content. Where they are less suitable is in presenting large bodies of text. Text is much more satisfactorily handled on a web page or in a PDF, both of which more easily allow the reader to search and scan.

When combined with an audio narration, slide shows take on many of the characteristics of video, allowing the learner to maintain visual focus on a sequence of images while these are explained in audio. Obviously if the intention is to depict actual events, in full motion, slides will not do as well as material captured with a video camera.

Formats

You have a wide range of distribution formats to choose from, each with its own distinct capabilities:

We’ll be examining these options in much more detail in future postings.
Coming next: creating the slides