Create Engaging PowerPoint Presentations
that Facilitate Great Teaching—Really!
Free yourself from the linear straitjacket of PowerPoint! In this workshop, you’ll learn to create presentations that facilitate spontaneity and active learning by mastering a few relatively simple techniques. With these skills, you can easily respond to teachable moments, reiterate challenging information, and reinforce the connections between ideas. For example, imagine that during your sensation and perception lecture, a student asks about how we integrate sound and vision. To answer, you bring up a slide about brain structure from your neuroscience lecture—then pick up with sensation and perception right where you left off—no fuss. (Or maybe you’d rather switch to another topic entirely. That’s just as easy.) All it takes is a simple navigation system to provide seamless access to every one of your PowerPoint slides.
You’ll also learn to make your lectures even more engaging by embedding images, videos, Web content, simulations, demonstrations, and experiments in your slides. All this can be achieved using a plain-vanilla version of PowerPoint and free online resources that are independent of any particular course management system, textbook, or equipment. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll work on a sample set of slides, explore recommended sites for artwork and video, and learn to develop your own in-class exercises. Please bring your laptop computer, equipped with any relatively current version of PowerPoint software. A sample PowerPoint presentation will be provided; you may also wish to bring a presentation set that you actually use in class.