Narrated Slideshows 101

Narrated Slideshows Do you ever use PowerPoint or KeyNote slideshows? Does your textbook come with supplemental slideshows? Have you grown dependent on your slide deck to deliver your lectures? Have your students grown accustomed to slideshows as a lecture delivery method? Have you ever considered narrated slideshows?

128

One simple way to convert your typical face-to-face lecture to an online lecture is to narrate your slideshow. Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple KeyNote are powerful slideshow presentation tools to augment public speaking. Professors and students can add clip art, charts, videos, music, hyperlinks, and text to their slideshows. With the record slideshow tool, one can narrate a presentation or rehearse timings with a headset and echo cancelling microphone. Narration is particularly useful for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners as well as various learning styles and abilities (CAST, 2012; Gardner 2011).

Variations None.

Examples Use your imagination. What kinds of slideshows would enhance your lectures? What would be an appropriate slideshow topic for your students? Only you know what would be authentic to your field of study, your curriculum, and your students. To get started, consider these ideas: Visual Arts •Lighting type images •RGB colour graphs •Broadcast news cycle diagrams •Modern art trivia Health & Community Studies •Natural disaster images •Vaccine column charts with error bars •Human development cycle diagrams •Health ethics headlines Science & Technology •Trigonometry in everyday images •Water scatterplot graphs with trendline •Temperature 3-D area charts •Pollution rate statistics Business Administration •Marketing ad images •Corporate organization charts 129

•Business process flowcharts •Legal precedence cases Humanities & Social Sciences •Mythology images •Consumer price pie charts •Character venn diagrams •Canada census demographics

Merits A well-designed slideshow with good visual imagery can enhance a public speaking presentation. In a flipped classroom or online course, a narrated slideshow is an easy way to adapt a classroom lecture. Not only does the narrated slideshow have audio and visual elements, but it is also self-paced. Student-generated slideshow presentations with narration can make for a great efair. We can even make interactive quiz show games.

Visually-Driven. A good slideshow uses images like photographs, charts, graphs, and maps to augment the presentation. This can really help bring a topic to life. “A picture tells a 1,000 words” (author unknown). Not only does imagery liven our presentations, but it appeals to visual learners. In particular, English as a Second Language (ESL) learners benefit from strong visuals (CAST, 2012; Gardner, 2011).

Self-Paced. In an online environment, if you present the slideshow as a video, then learners have control of the pace (CAST, 2012; de Wet, 2006; Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012). This is especially useful if students can view a lecture before and after the class to preview and review (Bowman, 2009). Practically speaking, it is also useful when students miss a class to keep up. Finally, a narrated slideshow would work well in a flipped classroom approach. Using mixed representation, expression, and engagement with visual and auditory features makes learning more accessible for all learner abilities (CAST, 2012; Gardner, 2011).

Flipped Classroom. For professors who want to flip their classroom, lecture capture with slideshows is fairly easy. Most of us are familiar with PowerPoint or KeyNote. The slide templates are visually driven, easy to follow, and easy to adapt or create (de Wet, 2006).

Mastering the narration tools is a relatively easy next step. A flipped classroom approach is useful in face-to-face, blended, and online classrooms.

130

eFairs. In the same way that we deliver slideshow presentations, we often have our students present with slideshows individually or in groups. Consider having students create their own narrated slideshows to share in an efair in the learning management system (LMS) rather than delivering in class. It saves class time, especially in large classes, by moving the presentations to a flipped classroom. This is especially good for shy students and English as a Second Language learners (CAST, 2012). Make sure to encourage students to comment on their classmates presentations and review peer critique keeping the core rules of Netiquette in mind: be polite, friendly, and respectful (Shea, 2004).

Games. While not narrated videos, nor lectures, you could even make interactive games with slideshows. Using hypertext, hyperlinks, and action buttons, you can create simple quiz show like games. There are many open source PowerPoint templates for trivia games like Jeopardy or multiple choice games like Who Wants to be a Millionaire. These can be great for preview and review to a lesson. Students can play individually, in teams, in the classroom, or at home.

Challenges Most slideshows lack good design elements. Many are full of text heavy slides that students copy from without thinking about critically. These slideshows are passive rather than active. Narrated slideshows work well for flipped classroom approaches but do create large files.

Poor Design. PowerPoint replaced the old slide projectors that teachers used to use to show pictures on a large screen. When teachers used these images, they used them just as visual aids to augment the presentation and discussion. According to Isseks, the problem with PowerPoint “is not the power or the point, but the presentation� (2011, p.74).

Somehow, PowerPoint has morphed from an audio visual aid into a mind-numbing and monotonous (de Wet, 2006) lecture script of text heavy notes, bullet points, and even full paragraph passages. Instead of replacing the slide projector, it has become a substitute for the overhead projector and photocopier.

Probably the most widely viewed PowerPoint is An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. His slideshow, turned documentary film, won several awards, including two academy awards.

The slides consisted of mainly photographs, charts, graphs, maps, videos, and simulations.

He used the slides as audio visual aids to enhance his message. Imagine if his slideshow had been only bulleted lists; would it have had the same impact?

131

It is with the visual aids that a slideshow impacts a lecture. If you, as the presenter, need your notes, you can use the notes, outline, or handout, features in PowerPoint and KeyNote rather than display your script to the class to read and/or write down. You can make your script available to students who may need it, namely English as a Second Language (ESL) students or those with learning disabilities. However, many students say that they can read your slides, so they do not need them read by you, too. Slideshows work best as audio visual aids to augment your lecture.

In her book, The Non-Designer’s Presentation Book, Robin Williams has several suggestions for designing effective presentations. For example, if you must use text, then limit your bullet points to 5 per slide and use the active voice - avoid passive voice and -ing words - the less wordy (the verb ‘to be’), the less characters. If you use a banner on your first slide, it is not necessary to carry your branding over to every slide. She suggests telling a story with your slides. Most importantly, she suggests asking yourself if you really need a digital presentation before you start to plan (2009).

Don MacMillan

Life After Death by PowerPoint

Overuse. Watch out for overuse of the bells and whistles like too much colour, background image, moving objects, transitions, animations, sound effects, and cheesy clip art (de Wet, 2006), which can be distracting and hindering to some learner types and abilities (CAST, 2012; Gardner, 2011).

Further, slideshow templates can take away from professor and student creativity (de Wet, 2006). Good slideshow design consists of simple slides with images and very little text (Isseks, 2011). Title slides can have impact; for example, a slideshow consisting of newspaper headlines, literary quotes, or political phrases to discuss could be very powerful.

Passive. In addition to the pitfalls of a poorly designed slideshow, presentations are passive for learners (de Wet, 2006; Gier & Kreiner, 2009; Isseks, 2011). It is like a Pavlovian response in what Isseks calls the “bulletization of education” (2011, 74). Students see the slides and mindlessly start to copy into their notes without any creative or critical discussion. The learning is only transmissive not transformative; the slideshow “fools us into thinking we have ‘taught’” (Isseks, 2011, p.76). This type of teaching only serves surface learning for coverage and for content memorization tests but not deep learning (Isseks, 2011).

132

Teacher-Centric. Not only are lectures passive, but they are also teacher-centred (de Wet, 2006). If we add some active learning techniques like content-based questions, we can make the lecture more student-centred requiring students to think critically, resolve problems, or create solutions (de Wet, 2006; Gier & Kreiner, 2009; Isseks, 2011). Further, we can use mixed media like clip art, images, graphs, videos, audio, and narration rather than bullet points (Isseks, 2011; Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2012). This enhances the learning, especially for visual and auditory learners (de Wet, 2006; Gardner, 2011) as well as for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners.

File Size. Narrated slideshows are very large files. Posting such a slideshow on the learning management system (LMS) may take you a long time to upload as well as a long time to download for the students. It can also bog down your LMS in general. In fact, any slideshow file can be difficult to download depending on the compatibility of the student’s computer software. Therefore, it is a good idea to convert your narrated slideshow to a web-hosted video.

You can save your slideshow as a movie on PowerPoint and KeyNote. Otherwise, you can convert your slideshow with SlideShare or iSpring. Then, you can host your video on YouTube, Vimeo, or iTunes as well as SlideShare by creating an account and setting your privacy settings. Finally, you can post a link or embed the video on the learning management system (LMS). Your students can do the same with their own presentations to share in an efair.

Instructional Design Use a backwards design approach. First, start with your learning outcomes. Second, create your assessments. Third, plan your instructional activities. Finally, choose a technology to enhance the lesson.

Design. Consider your curriculum; look carefully at your accreditation standards, graduate attributes, program learning outcomes, course learning outcomes, and lesson learning outcomes. Will a narrated slideshow fulfill the learning outcomes? How will you prepare students to follow a narrated slideshow? What technologies will you and your students need to learn in order to create narrated slideshows? Will slideshows enhance the learning experience?

Develop. Browse the Internet for sponsored or hosted slideshows already existing in your field. Determine if your textbook provider has supplementary slideshows to use or build 133

upon. Review existing slideshow technologies. Most of us are familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple KeyNote; while you can use Slides on Google Docs or Shows on Zoho Docs to create a web-based presentation, neither has the record narration features that PowerPoint and KeyNote have. Alternatives to a slideshow, especially for visual images might include Haiku Deck, Prezi, Pinterest, Flickr, or Instagram; however, these all lack narration features. Create stunning statistical images, infographics, with shareware like Infogr.am, Piktochart, Canva, or Venngage.

Create your own slideshow using a software program of your choice. Plan your talk with lots of prompts for students to stop and reflect, discuss, or create. Practice your presentation with the rehearsal and timings features in PowerPoint and KeyNote. Record your presentation using the narration feature and a echo cancelling microphone.

Types of lectures. A lecture is a talk or form of address to a large audience. Most lectures are expository - the professor talks and the students listen. More modern lecturers incorporate interactive activities into their lectures. They stop and ask the students questions or have the students summarize ideas in pairs or small groups. Some professors use clickers, student response systems, like Socrative and Kahoot or even Twitter during their in-class lectures to keep students engaged. There are many ways to make a lecture participatory:

•Bingo •Crossword •Fishbowl •Case Study •Summary or Reflection •Mind Mapping •Placemat or Job Aid •Panel, Press Conference, or Talk Show Plan your lecture using the outline tools in the slideshow to help you storyboard your presentation (de Wet, 2006). As with any talk or speech, begin with a hook to capture the audience - question, quote, definition, anecdote, or history. For a live readily adaptable lecture, use a current event, however, for lecture capture, choose a more sustainable and universal hook that will not date. Provide your students with an overview of your lecture, with an introduction, body, and conclusion, to guide your students with taking notes. Wrap up your lecture with a brief summary of the main points and some future considerations or cliffhangers to keep your audience in suspense until the next lecture.

134

CRAP. Make sure to use good basic elements of design. Each slide should have a focal point, which you can create with CRAP - contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity (Williams, 2008) (Williams, 2009). If you must use text, for greater readability, use black text on a white background or white text on a black ground. Limit bullet points to five per slide and remember to capitalize bullet points, use familiar fonts, and avoid all capitals (CAST, 2012; DHHS, n.d.; Williams, 2008) (Williams, 2009).

Deliver. Decide what students will do before, during, and after the slideshow. Before the lecture, students might read their textbook and complete a pre-quiz. During the lecture, students may complete interactive exercises. After the lecture, students might do a postquiz or journal reflection. The slideshow should be authentic, active, and applied.

Microsoft PowerPoint

Apple KeyNote

SlideShare

Technology To create a narrated slideshow you will need four things. First, you will need slideshow software like PowerPoint or KeyNote.

Second, you will need an echo cancelling microphone to record your narration using the narration tools provided in the software.

Third, save your slideshow as a movie. Fourth, you will need to host your slideshow on a web-based platform like SlideShare, YouTube, or Vimeo; post a link to the narrated slideshow in your course.

References Bowman, L. (2009). Does posting PowerPoint presentations on WebCT affect class performance or attendance? Instructional Psychology, 36(2), p.104-107.

Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST). (2012). Universal Design for Learning.

Retrieved from http://www.cast.org/index.html de Wet, C.F. (2006). Beyond presentations: Using PowerPoint as an effective instructional tool. Gifted Child Today, 29(4), p.29-39.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). (n.d.). The research-based web design & usability guidelines. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Retrieved from http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/

135

Gardner, H. (2011). Frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Basic Books.

Gier, V.S. & Kreiner, D.S. (2009). Incorporating active learning with PowerPoint-based lectures using content-based questions. Teaching of Psychology, 36(2), p.134-139.

Isseks, M. (2011). How PowerPoint is killing education. Educational Leadership, 68(5), p.74-76.

McMillan, Don. (2012, September 12). Life After Death by PowerPoint [YouTube] [03:59] Retrieved from https://youtu.be/MjcO2ExtHso Shea, V. (2004). Netiquette. Retrieved from http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/ index.html Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a distance (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Williams, R. (2008). The non-designer's design book (3rd ed.). Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.

Williams, R. (2009). The non-designer’s presentation book. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.

136

EMERGING TRENDS COLLECTION

Paula Ogg © 2020 Photography by Jonathan Eger