For this assignment I decided to update a slide presentation from EDCI 336 (Technology and Innovation in Education) that I took in my second year of university. This was originally a group project and I have now updated it since I know more about giving presentations and teaching. I have learned A LOT since creating this presentation so I have therefore made A LOT of changes.

The first thing I changed was the look of the presentation. David JP Phillips talks about the importance of contrast in your slides and gives the example of a dark background with light coloured writing. Rather than having the slides be a variety of colours (I think we assigned a colour to each person in our group so we presented the slides that were of our colour), I changed them all to dark blue because I know that dark blue is pretty consistent for those who are colour blind and I chose white writing for contrast. MANY of the slides contained paragraphs from our research and I remember we mostly read them straight off the slide because we were not prepared for our presentation… David talks about how you should never include paragraphs on your slide and Mayer says “People learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included” (Mayer, 2014, p.8) so I changed he slides to only include main points. The main points on my slides support Mayer’s signalling principle which is “People learn better when cues are added that highlight the key information and its organization” (Mayer, 2014, p.8). While narrowing down what the key points were I thought about how David explains that people can only retain 6 pieces of information at a time. For example when I wrote the positives and negatives slides I made sure to only include 6 even though there are more. Every slide includes simple language and serves as highlights for what I would be speaking about. If I were giving this presentation again I would have a script or try to memorize more of the research that I had done instead of reading paragraphs off of the slides. This is a prime example of death by powerpoint! It is a little embarrassing looking back at this slide presentation but it also goes to show how much I have learned since then!

Once again here is the original

Here is the improved

References:

Mayer, R. E. (Ed.). (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139547369

TEDx Talks (April 14th, 2014). How to avoid death By PowerPoint | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholmSalon. [Video] YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwpi1Lm6dFo