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Teaching Tips from Your TCC


A Flexible Alternative to PowerPoint by Richard Olivo, Derek Bok Center, Harvard University

PowerPoint is widely used for presenting pictures and text during lectures, but it has disadvantages. Some of these are spelled out vividly in a critique by Edward Tufte (2003). One of the disadvantages cited by Tufte and others is that PowerPoint tends to confine the speaker to a single pre-set path, discouraging spontaneity and diminishing flexibility in response to the audience's interests. Luckily, a more flexibile alternative is already available on your computer. You can display your lecture slides as pages in a Web browser.

Web browsers as presentation tools
Web browsers (like Netscape and Internet Explorer) are already equipped to do most of what PowerPoint does. They display text in various sizes and colors, show images (including animations), and play video and sound with standard plug-ins. Most computers in lecture rooms have one or more Web browsers preloaded on them, and it is as easy to display Web files as it is to show PowerPoint files. Your files can be on a CD-ROM, a portable disk, or even on a distant server accessed over the internet if the lectern computer has a fast internet connection.

Browsers cannot only emulate much of PowerPoint, they can also do things that PowerPoint does not. They can have multiple windows open simultaneously, allowing you to activate slides as you need to by clicking on them while still keeping other windows in view. Windows can be different sizes if you wish to have big points and little examples. A table-of-contents window can be on screen at all times, allowing you to jump spontaneously to different topics. The windows can have multiple links to successor pages if you wish to decide which slide to show at the time you are speaking. Your examples can be Web pages from other sites, which will launch quickly because you are already in a browser. You can also effortlessly put your presentation on your own Web site for the audience to review later, since it is already in Web format.

What Web browsers do not do easily is pop on bullet points one by one, or show jazzy transitions when text appears or slides change. Many critics of PowerPoint's distracting graphics would say that these deficiencies are really advantages in disguise.

Guidelines for creating presentation pages
As in PowerPoint, you need to design your Web pages so they can be read easily when projected. This means using a large type size, keeping your text brief, and using contrasting colors. Most Web-authoring applications (like Dreamweaver) will allow you to control these aspects easily. You will have to learn one of these Web authoring applications if you have not already done so, and this will be more difficult than authoring in PowerPoint if you are a complete novice. On the other hand, Web authoring is a very useful skill to acquire.

Images for your slides need to be embedded in HTML pages. If you need animation (do you really need animated images?), GIF images can be animated without a plug-in, while JPEG images cannot be animated that way. For video clips, the most common formats are QuickTime and Windows Media Player, either of which can be displayed on Macs or PCs. Flash is also becoming a standard format for Web animations, graphics, and video.

Gather the Web pages for your lecture in a folder, which will serve as a miniature portable Web site. Have a top page that will serve as your starting point, and name it something that you will recognize easily when you give your lecture (eg, "StartHere.html"). The top page can be linked to the second page, which in turn will have links forward and back, or the top page can serve as a table of contents that links to pages for each of the major subtopics. Any page can have multiple links, such as to subsidiary examples that appear in second windows (the HTML code for opening a second window is a link that ends in "TARGET=window"). Use relative addressing to create links within the presentation pages, so that they will be interconnected properly no matter where the files are stored. Use absolute addressing to access pages that will be brought in over the internet.

If the lectern computer is not your own laptop, make sure it has the appropriate plug-in software that your pages require, such as QuickTime or Flash. If you are not in your own classroom, this may require advanced notice to your host. Once these technical niceties are taken care of, you will have a presentation format that is the equal of PowerPoint in most important respects, and its superior in flexibility.

Reference:

Tufte, Edward (2003) PowerPoint is evil. Wired Magazine, Issue 11.09, September 2003. https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Copyright  2002-2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Permission is granted to non-profit educational institutions to print and distribute this document for internal use provided that the Bok Center's authorship and copyright are acknowledged.

Julie Damerell
Transitional Studies
03/02/2011