Year 7: Presentations with PowerPoint

Learning Objectives

• Use PowerPoint to create a presentation with a number of slides, transitions and animations
• Give a talk to your class using your presentation
• Identify themes for each slide in a presentation by identifying topics within the overall subject
• Find images to illustrate the talk
• Use short phrases such as headings and bullet points to provide structure and sequence to your talk

Presentation Basics

• Presentations are mainly used to illustrate a talk, to give structure to what you say and to provide a prompt in place of notes or cards. You should never read from a presentation, this will annoy your audience, who can read things more quickly for themselves, and you will end up facing the screen instead of your listeners.
• Use headings and bullet points rather than sentences and paragraphs. Short phrases should be enough to start you talking. If you write sentences you will end up reading them.
• Use resources that illustrate your talk such as photographs, video and sounds. Don't use these for the sake of it. If you include a photograph make sure it illustrates a point and then talk about it. If you use sound or video explain what it is and then turn it on so the audience can watch or listen. Don't just have sounds and video running in the background where they will be a distraction.
• Don't overuse animation. There is a temptation to replace simple words and phrases with text that visits every corner of the screen before making itself legible and to make pictures perform spirals and wobbles before they become recognisable. This is largely unnecessary and annoying to an audience. Animation can be used very effectively but producing worthwhile effects is hard work.

Your slides divide into 3 types:

1. Introduction - one or two slides giving the title, the author (you) and a list of contents - tell people what you are going to talk about.
2. Main part - slides with the details of what you have to say; the slides should match the list of contents you gave earlier.
3. Conclusions - draw together what you have said and remind people of the main points.

Exercise: details here.

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