Last Updated on April 22, 2023 by Uncle Pat Ugwu
Microsoft PowerPoint is the foremost known educational technology tool. Many teachers have used it to teach since its launch. Teachers have been using it as an educational tool, although it was developed for speech presentation. In this post, we are going to discuss how to enhance lecture content in PowerPoint.
Fast-forward to this period of online courses and eLearning boosted by COVID-19. MS PowerPoint is still one of the great tools of technology in education. But some teachers do not have adequate training in using this tool or other presentation tools. This makes teaching with PowerPoint not interesting to learners.
Below are tips that will help you to enhance lecture content in PowerPoint. If you are just new to using this educational tool. Consider reading up on our previous post on how to start a PowerPoint Presentation (Step-by-Step) guide.
1. Know your audience
To start with, you should be well-acquainted with your audience if you aspire to gain dexterity in the teaching professional space. Therefore, it will be great to create e-learning strategies that directly contribute to the type of audience you have in order to maximize the overall organizational goals.
Teaching content created for higher students should not be used for lower-level classes. In using MS PowerPoint, you will need to decide whether to use more text or images.
2. Avoid the traditional ‘PowerPoint’ look
Although PowerPoint is a highly recommended aspect of e-learning, I suggest you refrain from being completely dependent on its, traditional design. Use other custom-made PowerPoint designs for your slides. There are free and paid PowerPoint custom designs online for downloaded.
Instead, let your creative juices flow as you do the design yourself by trying to make your presentation as attractive as possible. And that’s not all. There are a host of other technical applications that can make your PowerPoint slides truly stand out from the crowd.
3. Leverage multimedia
While designing e-learning courses, an essential tip you can use is to make the best use of the several available multimedia tools. For instance, adding copyright-free images pertinent to your course would enhance the look of your presentations considerably.
Pictures they say speak a thousand words. However, to make your PowerPoint presentation look more impressive, choose appropriate images. Ideally, you should always choose vector images. The beauty of using vector images is that they do not suffer in terms of quality even when they are resized, or in other words, ‘scaled’.
Using a combination of images like charts, illustrations, callouts, etc. would make your lesson more interactive.
4. Use videos carefully
Now, when you are utilizing videos, you must be very careful about their length. The thumb rule of using videos in e-learning is that you should always keep them short and simple. I would recommend limiting the length of your videos to a maximum time frame of three to four minutes.
Similarly, audio descriptions and sounds may also be used to highlight points on different occasions. These categories of multimedia play a vital role in enhancing lecture content in PowerPoint.
5. Tell a story
Once you start to familiarize yourself with the basics of MS PowerPoint and other education tools, try to represent your content uniquely. A smart tip for you: try to convey your message to your students in the form of a story. A story is an innovative way to capture the attention of learners, and it retains their interest as well.
You can as well employ gamification in education principles in your PowerPoint lesson note. This will help you to keep their attention throughout the lesson period. You can also use screen recorder software to enhance your story.
Final Thoughts
These are just some of the guidelines that you can employ if you aspire to be good at creating educational content with Microsoft PowerPoint. I can assure you that once you get started with it, you would definitely enjoy the process of designing your personal lesson presentation a lot more than before.
There are different factors that affect educational technology in Africa, but proper utilization of a simple tool like PowerPoint will go a long way to help the situation.
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