creating better PowerPoints: notes on Bozarthzone! Where’s the Power? What’s Your Point?

Now that I’ve got almost a full semester of teaching this information literacy class under my belt, I’ve been thinking about ways I can improve my teaching in the future. Some of them are things I should’ve been doing already (my education professors would have me drawn and quartered if they knew I taught 3.5-hour classes without formal lesson plans!), but I just flew by the seat of my pants this semester. I didn’t get the required textbooks or know what I was supposed to be teaching until about a week before classes started, so I spent hours each week figuring out exactly what I was going to teach. As my supervisor there says, “Your first semester is just about surviving.” Now that it’s almost over, I can focus on refining it.

What I’ve come up with so far:

• Lesson plans
• Assessment for every class
• Learning styles
• 4 I’s
• Rubric for each assignment
• Better PowerPoints

In order to help with this last point, I attended a webinar on creating better PowerPoints yesterday. My notes are below.

Bozarthzone! Where’s the Power? What’s Your Point?

Jane Bozarth

April 12, 2pm

• Determine the most critical 20% of your content and focus on that
  • If you aren’t spending 50% of your time on these points, you’re trying to cover too much
• People can fill in the details on their own
• Need to surprise audience
  • Mind is lulled into inattention by slide after slide
  • Surprise them!
• Make content memorable
  • 1 medium movie theatre popcorn has 37 grams of fat
  • A lot, but not really memorable
  • USDA showed a picture of 1 popcorn = 1 plate of bacon and eggs, 1 hamburger and fries, and 1 steak platter
  • Be emotional, concrete, credible
• Stories or any kind of narrative are memorable
• Remember the journalism triangle

http://bozarthzone.blogspot.com/

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