Week 4 Readings PowerPoint Tips

In conclusion to the Atkinson and Mayer article about reducing PowerPoint overload I found the information very interesting and helpful. If you think about it for years and years we have always been told how to write papers and make them meet the requirements of certain paper formats. As technology has improved over the years so has the use of PowerPoint. In the education field I would say that a good majority of teachers use PowerPoint on a regular basis. We are always trying to find ways to differentiate instruction. PowerPoint has been great to the world of educators but until reading this article I'm not sure I ever thought about how the PowerPoint should be formatted. I honestly just tried to make it the best, I figured if it looked good and was full of color and bullets than my students would find it interesting. As a teacher of students with disabilities I've probably been increasing the cognitive load with all this color and accidentally decreasing my chances of retention. I think Travis made a good comparison to on old acronym K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple Stupid. I really liked all 5 of the points that were made in the article. I really liked the first point about your title of the slide. I'm curious to go back and look at previous PowerPoints I've made and determine if the title is actually effective. I would be scared to view my presentations in Slide Sorter and see if the titles flow and tell a story. All of these points were very information and I know that this will help me develop much more effective PowerPoint presentations in the future.

Luke