I hate PowerPoint presentations. Period.
So many times, PowerPoint presentations are done extremely poorly. Too much "flash and bang" with different effects for page-change, audio, riot of colors, text effects; All of these make for a poor presentation. Ugh.
Unfortunately for me, one of the assignments
for my biology class this term was to create and deliver a PowerPoint
presentation in class. We've been subjected
presented with several of these already in class, so I got to see some
of what the other students were doing, and how they did it. Suffice to
say that most of them were... Let's just call them "interesting", in
order to be polite.
I opted to present mine this past Thursday,
which was the first week after spring break. I figured that I'd be
able to spend some time during break to get it put together, since I
already had a good idea of what I would do: Pandemic Flu
(the other end of that link has a PDF of the presentation, originally created on a Mac and exported to PDF... Cool!)
So,
I got up and gave my presentation. The teacher (Ph.D in biology) asked
several tough and pointed questions about my presentation, which he
hadn't done for the others that I've seen so far. Yes, I had the
answers, and for one I indicated that I'd go over that point later in
the presentation. One of my classmates (another one headed for medical
school) commented that she though it was cool that I didn't just read
off my slides, but rather talked about them and referred to the points
on them.
The presentation is worth 50 points on the grade. As instructor and I exchanged places, I saw that he'd noted "50" on the top of the first page of the printed copy that was required. Not bad, if I say so myself.
Comments
It's amazing how different one's perspective is once they've been "out in the world" for a little while. I was in several classes where we had to do group presentations (aka torture). Other group members tried to cram every word they wanted to say on a slide and then read it while having sound effects and twirling page changes, etc. When I put the kibosh on that idea and designed a presentation with bullets and few effects they were surprised to get a good grade.
I did have one microbiology lecturer who used his laser pointer to do the "bouncing ball" above the words on his slides as he read them off word for word in his best impression of a Latino Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. If it hadn't been so dreadfully boring, I might have found it amusing. What's even sadder is that he was talking about how crime labs replicate DNA a la CSI. That had the potential to be really cool, but I digress.
Hopefully the "interesting" presentations are winding down for the term so you can get a little break before being subjected to more academic torture. :)