Death by a thousand cuts or a brilliant presentational package?MS PowerPoint

There are many online training packages, much additional online support guidance available, as well as useful tuition books which you can peruse at your own pace. The ECDL qualification (European Computer Driving Licence) contains sufficient information to enable you to compose your own PowerPoint presentation with ease and confidence.

If you are a technophobe, be encouraged – young children can create PowerPoint presentations. Those of us who remember the old Commodore Pet or BBC computers of the early 1980s, may recall hours spent typing in long strings of commands using Basic, just to achieve the sight of eg a robot walking stiffly across the screen. Mastering MS PowerPoint is, in my opinion, much, much easier!

A PowerPoint presentation contains a series of slides united by a common theme. The first slide is called a ‘master slide’ and contains the title of the presentation. You can add as many information-carrying slides as is necessary. It is wise not to exceed ten to twenty slides, as it is difficult for the audience to maintain concentration and to absorb new information when expected to focus on a large number of slides. Twenty slides can provide you with the basics for an hour long talk. Forty slides will have your audience reaching for their matchsticks to prop open their eyes. To maintain your audience’s interest and attention, your presentation should be tightly-focussed, meaningful and interesting to the receivers. It is a good technique to intersperse the slides with relevant anecdotes illustrating the point you are making, as well as occasional practical activities.

Having decided on the structure and content of your talk, you need to create your slides, which will provide the framework of your talk. There is a wide range of possible slide layouts, which can be accessed through ‘Format’ on the toolbar. These could include text only, text plus content (eg text plus graph), title and chart, and many other possible layouts. Similarly, there is a big selection of pre-created slide designs, though personally I think a fancy design detracts from the clarity with which you are presenting the information. So I use a plain or two-coloured background, using the special fill effects. In our Local Authority, official training presentations should be made using the authority’s official design, which contains certain colours and our logo. Thus uniformity of presentations is achieved.

Depending on the purpose of your presentation, you can use bullet points, which can be made to appear one at a time, using the excellent special effects to be found under slide show – custom animation. You can even have a picture of, say, a witch, flying around on the slide. However, do not be tempted to use too many special effects as this will distract the audience and detract from the success of your presentation.It is possible to pre-record speech, music or other sounds, linking the sounds to individual slides. The slides can be advanced at the click of the mouse or automatically after a preset interval. You can also pre-record continuous narration, setting the slides so that they advance automatically (accompanied by the narration) at the speed which you have selected. This ability to pre-record sound is particularly useful if you wish to deliver a dual language presentation, where the written words are in English, but the recorded words are in, for example, French. This is useful when addressing a multi-lingual audience.

1. Do not turn your back on the audience when you need to refer to the slide on the screen. It is possibly to see the same slides of the computer screen in front of you.

As an EAL teacher, working with pupils who have no or little English, I find MS PowerPoint a particularly useful tool for pre-teaching and consolidating everyday vocabulary in a highly visual manner. There are many free PowerPoints available to download on the internet, especially on school and teacher websites. But I prefer to create my own, using clipart, photos and home-made video clips.My favourite application of the MS PowerPoint is to create short, simple stories, for example showing the story of Christmas, or of a child being sick and being seen by the doctor. I then encourage my (shy) EAL pupils to record the captions or narrative for me. And perhaps to experiment with the special effects or background colour, thus enhancing their ICT skills as well as encouraging clear speech. (If you would like further information of work that I have put onto the internet, please feel free to send me a message and I will send you the appropriate website information. )