Tired of using old static PowerPoint presentations during your online classes? Perhaps it’s time to change things up. ELTA has come up with a list of simple things you can do to make your PPTs stand out, boost learner participation and give your presentation an overall professional feel. Let’s take a look at five simple ways you can make your PPTs pop!
● Picture Perfect: First impressions are important, and nothing catches the viewer’s attention faster than the images you use when making your PPT. A simple google search will provide you with a massive library of images to use when assembling your PPT. Simply choose an image either based on the theme of your lesson or a particular language item that you’re focusing on and add it to the slide. You can follow our detailed guide to learn how to insert pictures when preparing a PPT.
● Colour Coordination: No one will enjoy staring at a gaudy mess for an hour, so it’s vital to make your PPTs pleasing to the eye. Make sure that the colour of the font you use compliments not only your PPT template but also the pictures you use for the slides. It’s also best to stick to a single theme colour for the entire PPT rather than changing the colours in each slide.
● Animations: Microsoft PPT allows you to animate texts and images within each slide. This feature is great for exercises such as Fill in the Blanks or Complete the Sentence as teachers can animate the answers to appear one by one when conducting feedback. Animations make your PPTs feel more alive and give them a very professional look and feel. You can follow our detailed guide to learn how to animate objects when preparing a PPT.
● Flawless Transitions: Much like animations, Microsoft offers a wide variety of transitions you can use when moving from one slide to another. Whether you prefer a simple fade-away effect or something a little more eccentric, you’ll be spoiled for choice when clicking on the transitions tab. However, we strongly recommend basing your choice of transitions on the tone and theme of the lesson as being overzealous may make your PPT look amateurish rather than professional. You can follow our detailed guide to learn how to use transitions when preparing
a PPT.
● Audio/Video: The internet is a wonderful thing and online classes give you immediate access to a wide array of audio and video that can make your class stand out without any additional setup. You can copy and paste YouTube URLs to a PPT slide to give you immediate access to millions of videos and songs available on the website. You can even insert audio files directly into a PPT slide and play it from there. Making an audio or video the centrepiece of a lesson is a great way to liven up your classes and boost student interaction. Our detailed guide for inserting audios and YouTube URLs into PPTs will get you started in no time.
So that’s our list of ways to make your PowerPoint presentations stand out. Have you tried it? Have you seen any improvement in-class engagement? Let us know how it went in the comments below. Also, if you would like any topic to be covered in the future feel free to drop a comment or get in touch at info@eltaglobal.in.