 Hi, this is Jennifer Gonzalez. I'm going to talk to you today about how Presentation Zen fixed my bad PowerPoints. So to demonstrate, I am going to show you an old PowerPoint from back when I thought I was great at PowerPoints. Here's the first slide. I organized my material in outline form, placed it on the slide, and then I made my PowerPoints available to my students so that they could review them later. And then I would give them handouts like this sometimes or just send them the PowerPoint as an attachment. And so this whole process is probably really familiar to a lot of people looking at this, right? According to Presentation Zen, the problem with these kinds of slides is that they really do not require the presenter to be interesting or informative or really even be there sometimes. We make these slides into kind of a script so that they could basically stand completely on their own. If that's the case, then what's the point of presenting them live at all? Why bother to actually talk to your students when we could just give them a PowerPoint and have them read it? Some people would argue that the presenter is really what makes the difference, that even though we might have slides that tell everything, that we talk off the slides and we offer our own personal experiences and really enliven and enrich the content. But the thing is, with a block of text on the screen, your students aren't exactly going to be captivated. So I'm just going to take one slide from that presentation and I'm going to revise it. I'll show you how I changed it to fit the principles of Presentation Zen. So the point of this slide was to introduce the ideas of Jean Piaget. The two main problems with this slide is that there's way too much text on it. And Presentation Zen emphasizes that we should have as little text as possible on our slides. And also there's no visuals. And many, many people are visual learners. And so if a concept is going to be memorable to them, we need to put something on the screen that is going to help us remember the concept. A lot of PowerPoint templates have visuals in them, but they're really just decoration. They're not there to help us actually remember the concepts. So the question that Gar Reynolds asks us to be constantly asking ourselves is, what information are you giving in written words that you could replace with a visual? So here's the new version of the slide. It starts with a blank white slide with only a few words. I put Piaget, that's a key term, and cognitive development, which is what he was all about. So the point of the original slide was to explain to students that Piaget's theory tells us that students grow or children grow from being very concrete thinkers to very abstract thinkers. So I put a picture of a child holding a pinwheel with the word concrete under it. And when I'm giving this presentation, I would explain for a while before I put anything else up there what concrete thinking is. This is the idea that something only exists if you can actually see it and touch it right in front of you. And then as they mature, children become more abstract thinkers. To show this, I would show the child without the pinwheel in her hand, but instead it's in a thought bubble. She can actually conceptualize of the pinwheel without having it actually in her hand. And that represents abstract thinking. Now here's the big difference with this slide, apart from the fact that I think it's way more visually appealing than the one before it, when I talk to my students later about Piaget, all I have to do is say to them the pinwheel and they're gonna remember concrete and abstract. They're gonna remember these images. Also notice, again, the building. I could have had everything just plunked down at once, but Reynolds really advises us to build our slides a little at a time with animation. And I'm gonna show you how to do that. So if you introduce elements as you talk about them, it can have greater impact. Okay, so here's the old slide. Now, you've probably already thought about this, that there's a bunch of stuff that was on the slide that is not there now. Two things about that. Number one, that's the stuff that you're gonna talk about in your lecture or in your presentation. You put the main ideas up on visuals and then you talk to your students or your audience. You don't just read it off the slide. Now, there's always gonna be the concern that you're going to forget something or maybe not represented in the way that the students are gonna remember. They won't have a takeaway to be able to remember all the information. That is where the almighty handout comes into play. You create these visually appealing slides with minimal text and then you provide your audience with a handout that has as much detail on it as you want. And the point of your presentation was to get them interested and motivated to read this handout. One last slide I'll show you is the cover. This title page came from the template. The cover came from the template and it was fine. I thought it was nice and clean, but now that I've read presentations and I won't see it the same way again. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you the revision of that. So starting with a nice clean blank screen, I inserted a piece of free clip art that I got online. And I chose marbles because the topic of the lecture is differentiation in meeting individual students' needs and marbles are all different. So that kind of sets that theme already. And then inserted two text boxes that give the title of the presentation. So I'm going to exit out and go into PowerPoint and I'll show you how I got that. I'm gonna create a new slide. I'm gonna get a lot of different slide options but I'm gonna choose blank. And then I insert a picture and then I can enter a text box. So again, we're on insert again, click text box. I get an arrow here. I can just hold down my mouse or my left. Okay, I also added a second title. So I'll go ahead and show you how I did that. And the reason I did that was so that if I wanted them to come in at different times, I could do that. To build this slide, I'm going to click the picture first. Click on animations. I'm really a big fan of just the fade in. So click that. Okay, right now it's set to fade in kind of slow. I kind of like things to fade in fast. So I'm gonna change the time. And so that is my first item that's coming in on the animation. And then I'll have this one come in second. Have that one fade in too. Again, keep it simple. Click the third item, add an animation to that one. Let me save. And we can take a look at just this slide. It starts out blank. Every time I click, I get my picture. Then I get a title, then I get another one. The concepts presented here all come from Gar Reynolds Fantastic Book Presentations and I urge you all to read it. There is a more extensive review of this book available right now on the Cult of Pedagogy website. And in that, I really talk more about how these concepts can be applied to teachers. And thanks so much and go make your PowerPoints better.