Chapter Demonstrable Skills
After completing the PowerPoint Chapter 2 portion of the Word & PowerPoint unit, students will be able to:
| Demonstrable Skill | Learning Activities & Informal Assessments |
Formal Assessments (excluding Exams) |
|---|---|---|
| Apply design themes to slides. |
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| Apply animations to slide objects. |
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| Embed movies and YouTube videos. |
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| Use slide transitions. |
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Chapter Notes
Designing effective presentations
The best way to understand best practices for PowerPoint is to look at examples of good presentations. Check out the Suggested Resources section below for two very different takes on how to develop and present using PowerPoint [2].
Slide masters
You can further modify and customize your presentation through the slide master [1]. Masters control the layout, background designs, and color combinations for handouts, notes pages, and slides, giving the presentation a consistent appearance. The slide master is the top slide in a hierarchy of slides based on the master. As you modify the slide master, elements in the slide layouts related to it are also modified to maintain consistency. You can modify a slide master or slide layout based on a slide master by selecting the Slide Master on the View ribbon.
Themes
Themes can be accessed on the Design ribbon. You can change variants, colors, fonts, and effects used in the theme [1]. Each PowerPoint theme has a colors gallery that provides a set of colors, a fonts gallery that pairs a title font and a body font, an effects gallery that displays a full range of special effects, and a background gallery that contains backgrounds consistent with the selected theme colors. To access the galleries, click the Design tab, in the Variants group, click the More button, and then choose the gallery you want to change.
Suggested Resources
Designing effective presentations
Death by PowerPoint
The presentation "Death by PowerPoint: A Letter to Presentation Killers" illustrates many of the common things that can make your PowerPoints dreadful. It's a good summary of things to avoid [3].
Life After Death by PowerPoint
Comedian Don McMillan's skit on bad PowerPoint presentations is a fun view about how PowerPoint presentations can be abused.
References
- A. Poatsy, K. Mulberry, C. Krebs, L. Hogan, A. Rutledge, and E. Cameron, Exploring Microsoft Office 2013, 1st ed., vol. 1. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2013.
- R. G. Phipps and B. M. Powell, “PowerPoint Chapter 2,” Computer Science 101, May 18, 2016. Available: https://cs101.wvu.edu/materials/units/word-powerpoint/powerpoint-chapter-2/.
- Ikedi, “Death by PowerPoint - Redesigned,” Aug. 26, 2013, Available: http://www.slideshare.net/kasidyray/death-by-powerpoint-redesigned.
- D. McMillan, Life After Death by Powerpoint 2010 by Don McMillan. 2009. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbSPPFYxx3o.