I've been teaching now for almost a decade, a large portion of which has included some form of presentation (usually a PowerPoint) as a core element of delivery. I've never really given too much thought into the specific reasons why and how I use PowerPoint, I've just considered it a convenient way to organize topics and structure a lecture. It's probably time to look more closely.
My own exposure to PowerPoint has mostly come from student presentations, the quality of which I shall be positive about and call 'variable'. I've also bumped into it with the brief stints of employment I've had in business offices, as another media type to deal with doing AV support at corporate events, and whenever a speaker has used it at a conference I've attended or viewed on-line. I've experienced very little in the way of PowerPoint teaching, going through school as I did before the software was quite so ingrained (although I am now getting plenty of it for my PGCE). Any 'style' I've ended up with seems to be one I've settled into myself, with advice taken judiciously from on-line articles.
Broadly speaking I tend to have three different styles of PowerPoint.
My own exposure to PowerPoint has mostly come from student presentations, the quality of which I shall be positive about and call 'variable'. I've also bumped into it with the brief stints of employment I've had in business offices, as another media type to deal with doing AV support at corporate events, and whenever a speaker has used it at a conference I've attended or viewed on-line. I've experienced very little in the way of PowerPoint teaching, going through school as I did before the software was quite so ingrained (although I am now getting plenty of it for my PGCE). Any 'style' I've ended up with seems to be one I've settled into myself, with advice taken judiciously from on-line articles.
Broadly speaking I tend to have three different styles of PowerPoint.
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My most 'traditional' presentations are those for subjects involving practical, workshop-based skills. Here the emphasis is on essential bullet points only, with lots of explanatory images. The density is kept to a reasonable level, hyperlinks are spread throughout to provide deeper information on-demand and images, sounds and videos are used liberally. The design is usually a stock one, but layouts tend to get ripped apart with several slides being built from the ground up to suit their purpose. I think they're pretty good as presentations go so it's somewhat of a shame I'm not teaching any of those subjects this year.
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For my scripting (as in programming) lessons my presentations are almost entirely text-based. This is to be expected given the nature of coding, though recently I've tried to include more imagery, particularly as an aid to describing abstract concepts. The slide design is minimal and unobtrusive, based on a built-in template but heavily customised with additional layouts. Mainly, the design choice is intended to make more effective use of the slide area by reducing white-space, important for fitting in those code snippets at a reasonable font size. I've made some efforts to slim down the number of bullet points over subsequent revisions; however as much as I've cut down on the top-level points they are still crowded with sub-levels, sometimes as much as three deep. They're also pretty long - over twenty slides is common. My defence is I don't really intend the slides to be read all that closely during the presentation; I'd rather they listen to what I'm saying and have a go at the exercises. The slideshow is meant more as both a revision aid for the students in the form of condensed notes as well as my own set of cue cards, fairly essential considering the subject involves many important details and benefits from a rigid structure. However that means I'm effectively using presentation software for a whole bunch of things that aren't presentations. As it happens the modules I teach that include this style of presentation are all completely different this year so I'll be recreating most of it from scratch (sigh). This gives me the opportunity to make the slideshows more appropriate for use - if I use PowerPoint at all of course!
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The other style of presentation is the one I use for more abstract topics, such as semiotics or memetics. These lectures usually involve some form of two-way discussion with the students so the slides serve to signpost the key discussion points and help with pacing. Here I tend not to make heavy use of templates, sometimes not using one at all and going entirely free-form. This gives me more freedom to create a narrative across the slideshow that tries to promote a two-way dialogue. The downside to this is that they very much become part of an overall performance that includes my own lecturing and the students' live input. As revision aids for students they are less effective, being too abstract and lacking context, so I won't usually upload this type of presentation onto our VLE. I've more recently been adding extra contextual information into the slide notes section, but there isn't an elegant way to incorporate that into the slides' flow and of course the two-way element is absent completely.
Update
I've spent some time reflecting on what advantages PowerPoint brings to teaching other than being more contemporary than old-school chalkboards or OHPs. I like the presentation power of it myself, but I've never considered whether there is some inherent advantage to one over the other. As it turns out, some (slightly old) research suggests that there isn't, and whether digital works better over analogue technologies seems to be more down to its use on a case-by-case basis (Szabo & Hastings, 2000).References
Szabo, A. & Hastings, N., 2000. Using IT in the undergraduate classroom: should we replace the blackboard with PowerPoint? [Online] Available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131500000300, last accessed 15/1/2016
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