Making Slides That Move

Filed in Teaching with Technology Portfolio

I am not a big slide deck user. I have always tended to use the board and create a spontaneous presentation out of large class discussion. However, I have used slides at foundational junctures of courses that demand a substantial amount of new information at the outset. My composition course is a great example of this; I spend at least a week going through the rhetorical situation in detail, using slides to help corral all of that content for students' digestion.

Everyone knows the danger of slides: they often just project text that has already been consumed elsewhere (like in a textbook reading). This is boring, of course, but the reason why it's boring is that it offers students no way to engage with the material. When I design my slides, I do everything I can to make them dynamic. I use simple animations in PowerPoint to allow a slide to follow the structure of the conversation I bring students through.

I'm not kidding about the simple animations; I just have elements appear when I'm ready for them to, so as not to distract students with fancier-than-necessary movement. What matters here is that the slide is not stagnant; it's not just all the information, all at once.

My slides are definitely not the most technically proficient, and I'm sure that they can be improved. For instance, they do sometimes require a lot of reading, once all the animations have fired. Editing text to be more concise is always a plus on slide presentations, and that would also allow me to make the best use out of slide animations.

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