The new presentation slide goes up, and the students immediately give it their attention. Do the students quickly grasp the main assertion of the slide? Does the slide actually help students understand and retain the material? If the slide is posted as part of a set of notes, do the students understand it two weeks later?
In the past decade, presentation slides have become a common addition to the teaching of technical subjects. Ideally, these slides can emphasize key points, can show images too complex to explain in words, and can reveal the organization of the presentation. In addition, well designed slides can increase the retention of the audience from 10 percent (for just hearing) to 50 percent (for both hearing and seeing the material).
However, are the designs that most instructors use (and that programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint offer as defaults) really the most effective at communicating technical information? Michael Alley, author of The Craft of Scientific Presentation: Critical Steps to Succeed and Critical Errors to Avoid, argues that they are not.
Alley has published a new design for presentation slides which quickly orients the audience to the main assertion of the slide with a succinct sentence headline (no more than two lines) and then supports that headline with images and needed words. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Alley's design is using a national laboratory design for presentation slides, rather than the default design of Microsoft PowerPoint. Unfortunately, if a student simply opens up PowerPoint, making this change to the national laboratory design is not easy. For that reason, Alley has created two sets of templates to help students make this change. These templates, which are free for students to download, can be found at the following web address:
http://fbox.vt.edu/eng/mech/writing/speaking/template_slides.html
Also visit Alley's web site at www.me.vt.edu/writing/
for tools on teaching effective scientific writing.