The Productive Scholar: John LeMasney demonstrates PowerPoint

In the Pro­duc­tive Scholar on Octo­ber 4th, 2012, John LeMas­ney talked about using Microsoft’s ubiq­ui­tous pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware called Pow­er­Point. He started by dis­cussing “Death by Pow­er­Point”, a phe­nom­e­non where the audi­ence gives up on the pre­sen­ta­tion because of visual and men­tal fatigue due to the stereo­typ­i­cal Pow­er­Point audi­ence expe­ri­ence: read­ing lots of text on-screen, end­less slides of heavy con­tent, and trite, well-known themes and clip art through­out the pre­sen­ta­tion. Some meth­ods dis­cussed for help­ing audi­ences to avoid this phe­nom­e­non included start­ing with a blank theme, and cus­tomiz­ing it. The 10–20-30 method, in which pre­sen­ters use no more than 10 slides, present for no longer than 20 min­utes, and use text no smaller than 30 points in size, is one frame­work for mak­ing pre­sen­ta­tions more palat­able. Many con­tem­po­rary pre­sen­ters avoid using text alto­gether in their Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions, choos­ing instead to focus on illus­tra­tive images that under­line and rein­force what they are say­ing ver­bally. Pecha Kucha 20×20, a pre­sen­ta­tion frame­work that orig­i­nated in Tokyo in 2003, is a method for event orga­niz­ers to for­mat an evening of pre­sen­ters. It cre­ates a strict struc­ture for the tim­ing and con­tent of pre­sen­ta­tions, keep­ing talks to 20 slides pre­sented for 20 sec­onds each. LeMas­ney offered these ideas as a way to re-think pre­sen­ta­tions as spring­boards for dis­cus­sion.
The demon­stra­tion part of the talk looked at PowerPoint’s var­i­ous fea­tures, includ­ing using or dis­card­ing themes, insert­ing tables, using Smar­tArt to cre­ate visual orga­niz­ers and charts, chang­ing back­grounds, using the Mas­ter Slide edit­ing func­tion, and insert­ing pho­tos, videos and audio. Please watch the screen­cast below to see the details of this hands-on session.

Video Man­age­ment, Video Host­ing, Video Stream­ing, Video Plat­form