How to Create Effective PowerPoint Presentation

It is important that your listeners/learners digest your thought and the lesson properly. Hence, chunking your ideas into pieces would scaffold the learning from your presentation.

What should be displayed on the screen is the topic being talked about. For instance, you might want to use bullet points to present the subtopics. If you do this, present the bullets one at a time. You can do this by using the animation features of the PowerPoint. Charts can be put on the next slide to be referenced when you get to the data the chart displays.

Though you may want to put beautiful elements in your presentation, it is important to know that you should put only the necessary elements in your design.

Remember the acronym USE-B.  Lamb (2005) stated this 4 principles of designing projected materials:

1. First is Unity. It is important that you give your audience/learners the feeling of cohesiveness so they can understand your talk better. The use of uniform or consistent color pallette, font style, borders, lines, icon, bullet points, and the like would help you make your slides look cohesive.
2. Second is Simple. Remember the old sayings: “the simpler the better” or the acronym KISS “Keep It Short and Simple”. Do not put any design that are irrelevant to your content, this would just give your audience/learners confusion.
3. Third is Emphasis. Aside from giving your slide a cohesive look, it is also vital to provide your slide contents emphasis. This would help you convey your message or ideas easily. Lamb (2005) suggested that you may use the Rule of Thirds in designing your slides.
4. Last is Balance. It is important that your design elements together with your texts are balance. You may use Formal Balance in designing your slides. This is designing your elements in the slides symetrically.

One of the common mistake in making PowerPoint presentation is the highly use of different font styles and sizes, colors, text alinments, and images. This mistake would provide your audience/learner chaotic look of your slide and would affect their learning. One way to solve this is to have your standardized style sheet. Having your font style sheet would help you design your content in the slide effectively and with unity.

You can use the following in planning your style sheet:

1. Use Sans Serif Font Family for your body text. San Serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, or Calibri tend to be the easiest to read on screens.
2. Use decorative fonts only for your slide headers. But avoid too much decorative fonts such as calligraphies, script, hand writing, futuristics, etc, when this are not depicting what you are trying to say. The easy to read decorative fonts are the classy Serif fonts like Georgia or Baskerville.
3. Remember to be consistent. Stick to two, or at most, three font style for the whole presentation.
4. Avoid using all capital letters as they are difficult to read and might connote shouting.
5. Use 24 points font size or larger for your body text and 36 points font size for your headings.
6. Use sharp contrasting colors between the background and the font. Put dark text on a light background. This is easiest to read. Or you can use light colored text over a dark background.
7. Align your text left or right. But not centered nor justified. Though this may be pleasing to the eye, centered or justified text are harder to read and are not inclusive.

As mentioned in the previous tips, one helpful tool in presenting your ideas is the animation. The use of right animation and transition would help your presentation to become powerful and effective. It is just important to note that you have ti use it judiciously.

For the animation, you can use the most simple, subtle, and professional animation. You can use as simple as the “appear” animation.

For the transition between slides, use no more than one type pf transition effects. Again, look for the simplest effects.

One of the affordances of PowerPoint is it has the capability to embed videos, images, and audios. This is a powerful tool to maximize your presentation and make it more effective.

However, you must be aware of the copyright of the materials you are using. As much as possible, use your own quality video. If you use music or videos from the Internet, make sure they are from open educational resource sites or are not copyrighted. If  you will use copyrighted materials, site the source and better yet, ask permission from the owner.

Key tip: Use creative common licesence materials and do what the cc licences entail. For more information about creative common licensence you can visit this learning resource: https://networks.upou.edu.ph/23294/creative-commons-and-sharing-in-the-digital-age-ms-paula-filart/.