PowerPoint Reflection

In my PowerPoint Instructional Project, I created a presentation to show students and staff how to create and share a document in Google Apps.  The reason I chose this as my topic is because our school district uses Google Apps for Education.  Google Apps is a suite of products that provides cloud-based email, calendar, websites, as well as office applications such as a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software.  The main advantages to Google Apps is that it is accessible from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection, and for the collaboration opportunities it allows by utilizing the built-in sharing options. 

Because I was creating a PowerPoint presentation to be used as a training document, I felt like I needed to do more than provide written instructions. This need, however, created some obstacles to overcome such as how to insert graphics into the presentation, as well as how to take screen captures of those graphics.  Other obstacles I encountered included creating hyperlinks to external websites as well as links to slides within the document.  

These issues were overcome by first learning how to create a screen capture on my Mac laptop.  I learned that by pressing "shift+command+4", I could select a section of my screen and save that as an image file.  Next, I learned to insert the saved image into my presentation by going to "Insert", "Picture" within PowerPoint.  Most of the images I inserted were too large by default, so I learned how to resize the images by dragging the sizing handles around the images.  One of the most interesting things I discovered was how to insert links into my presentation that referenced other slides.  I did this by selecting a word, and then going to "Insert", "Hyperlink", and then "Place in this Document".  This allowed me to select an existing slide so that when someone clicked on the word, it opened the linked slide. By learning these skills, I was able to create a more informative presentation that provided a visual reference to what I was referring to, rather than only being able to read about it.

Optimizing instruction is important for several different reasons. The discussion of diminishing attention spans was especially enlightening.  I intend to implement the concept of front loading the more important topics into my next presentation. I have always leaned toward saving the most important for last, but I see why that is not effective because of diminishing attention spans.  Understanding that presentations loaded down with lots of bells and whistles do nothing to improve comprehension, but rather distract the audience, was also informative.  By creating simpler-looking presentations, not only do you save time by cutting down on how long it takes to you to create presentations, but it also improves the viewing experience for the audience.  Aside from these examples, other informative points worth mentioning are your consideration when choosing font size, type, color, and background color. 

Because of my occupation, I will mainly be using PowerPoint to create instructional documents. However, I do informative presentations from time to time as well.  In the future, I will be sure to use the lessons learned in this segment to create simpler, clearer, and more concise presentations.