PowerPoint in one minute
I gonna have a class tomorrow morning, and this is the title of the lesson.
Working with PowerPoint is not a problem for me. I can tell that again and again. But teaching what you know to other people always seems like a big problem. You will likely have a tendency to tell everything you know, and end up overloading yourself and your students. One other aspect is about how to teach it differently; at least it should be different from what they learn at IT schools, and still prove useful at the same time. I know very little about the students, which also is definitely a challenge. How can we plan a presentation with so little knowledge about the audience. The last, and also the most problematic problem, is to do that in 2 hours. What can you learn to do in two hours? A tool that empower you to speak in public? Maybe not.
Still I got to do it. I started with a search on peer-to-peer network to dig out some complete work on this topic. Luckily enough, I found some books on PowerPoint 2007, which may take you several weeks to read. Some useful articles were also found, particularly the one on Microsoft website. Together with my previous knowledge and experience in the field, I decided to stopping digging around and start reading about it. Consequently, I ended up with an outline, with cover almost every aspect of using PowerPoint, from creating a first slide to making it technologically rich and good. I printed the outline and read it over and over again. Needless to say, it gonna take me days to teach all these things.
It is a habit of mine since I took the Canberra course to read more and more about a topic if I still have not found a way out. So I read them all over again - basically just skimming, of course. Fortunately enough, I found a tip from Dummies' self help book, which could possibly be developed fully into a new approach of working with PowerPoint. And I did it, from which the lesson "PowerPoint in one minute" was created. For a brief explanation, you will need to prepare yourself in terms of updating your knowledge about the topic, reading the needs of the audience, outlining the speech, grabbing all the multimedia for illustration. Once you are ready, it will take 5 seconds to make the black-and-white version, then decorating and animating it, which takes some 20 seconds. With only the very essential marterials, use the rest 30 seconds to add them in the slides and enjoy the show!
So what can we draw from this experience? Do not start making a PowerPoint with PowerPoint. Use your brain!
