![]() |
Just look at all the boxes you can fill with stuff! |
I have to admit that I did love PowerPoint at first. When they added the letter-by-letter animations, I was still in middle school, and I couldn't wait to use them. I thought they looked really cool until I watched my slideshow just once and couldn't even sit through it myself. Animations, once the most exciting thing on the screen, were just distractions that lost the audience's favor (and quickly).
An even harder lesson to learn was appropriate information density, or managing clutter, a lesson PowerPoint certainly does not seem to be aware of (see image at top right). Tufte's advice on data-to-ink ratios would have been invaluable in this area, as would the six lines per slide, six words per line guideline. However, I'm not sure that Tufte is age-appropriate for most students that are being introduced to PowerPoint. For such a group, I feel that the now-global pecha-kucha presentations would be more suitable to show them the ropes, as far as effective information presentation is concerned.
Add a comment