Bulletproof from delivery to interactivity when teaching with PowerPoint

Abstract

PowerPoint slideware is one of the dominant tools in higher education. During more than two decades of pervasive use, little effort has been made to innovate and refrain from default slides and templates. This paper elucidates on how the effective use of PowerPoint can facilitate improved educational practices. Supported by the relevant empirical evidence, it is concluded that the use of the slideware goes hand in hand with little reflective deployment, also in education. On the basis of the literature, relevant principles of 'how to do' slides and 'what to do with' slides are derived. As these are insufficient to overcome the criticism that presentation 'delivery' regularly remains a one-way street, results from an explorative workshop are presented which allow for innovative, constructivist didactics in interactive sessions with PowerPoint. To provide a platform for further innovation, the findings are structured according to the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy.

Implementing an augmented reality and animated infographics application for presentations: effect on audience engagement and efficacy of communication

“…PowerPoint has slightly changed since it was published in 1984 and it does not fit within the new businesses surrounding by evolving technologies. Such technology was based on older methods which involved overhead projectors and slides with similar layout to PowerPoint slides called transparencies [84,88]. Even though, today PowerPoint is the most common slideware application [40], there is an urgent need for corporate organisations to abandon outdated methods and replace them with engaging, well-designed and powerful presentation methods that are memorable, visual and simple without diluting the information [72].…”

“…The popular use of bullet points to summarise information has led to loss of information. This is a necessary bad-practice due to the lack of space for effective communication on a slideware slide that leads to the breaking up of information into arbitrary fragments, losing the contents' context and focus [8,84,88]. Shaw, Brown and Bromiley [77] demonstrate that the method of summarisation using bullet points results in vague, generic and uncertain information.…”