@stephen: you have to volunteer for having your preso critiqued, which Dan will not do without permission because I, and others, gave him grief for doing an unsolicited critique of Vicki Davis’ preso last year. It’s a whole long story, not as interesting as say, “The Wire” but better than the gossip in the staff lounge.

On a more positive note, I’ve gotten some nice feedback from others out of this, that I used here.

I’ve been doing this since 2004 but you still keep posting.

Evidence here: http://www.downes.ca/me/presentations.htm

Here’s an example. This is a slide for a section of a language arts lesson on decoding and fluency from the publisher:

Project it, and you can see its flaws immediately. There is too much text, and it’s too small. When I first started doing these “charts” I did them in the same format, I would just have them animate in line by line. These were intended to be used on O/H projectors and I didn’t adjust them for Power Point and projection. Next, how my design evolved.

This still has many design issues, and the text at the top should be eliminated (hey, I did that slide 2 maybe 3 years ago, I’ve changed so have my slides), BUT it’s made an important evolution, I’ve only got what was on one line in the old slide on each slide.

This need to cram a lot in could be that we are still using the old formats we had with paper and O/H transparencies. We’re trying to be cheap and save resources, when we can have slide decks with 80 slide with little added cost compared to using 20.

Here’s an example. This is a slide for a section of a language arts lesson on decoding and fluency from the publisher:

Project it, and you can see its flaws immediately. There is too much text, and it’s too small. When I first started doing these “charts” I did them in the same format, I would just have them animate in line by line. These were intended to be used on O/H projectors and I didn’t adjust them for Power Point and projection. Next, how my design evolved.

This still has many design issues, and the text at the top should be eliminated (hey, I did that slide 2 maybe 3 years ago, I’ve changed so have my slides), BUT it’s made an important evolution, I’ve only got what was on one line in the old slide on each slide.

This need to cram a lot in could be that we are still using the old formats we had with paper and O/H transparencies. We’re trying to be cheap and save resources, when we can have slide decks with 80 slide with little added cost compared to using 20.

I’d be happy if I could just bring my colleagues around to the concept that presentation software is really a visual medium in the first place! (let alone make the slides visually appealing, powerful, able to convey the meaning without lots of explanation…)