Develop+Instruction

=Develop Instruction=

Developing PowerPoint Presentations by Creating Visuals & Content
Visual Literacy is an important concept when is comes to creating powerpoint presentations. When one gives a presentation, they must be concise, interesting, able to keep the audience's attention, and easy to read. PowerPoint presentations must be able to get the point across and be easy to understand. If you try to add to much detail onto one slide you have a much greater chance of either confusing your audience, or losing their attention entirely.

Example
One example of how useful visual literacy is this: you want to describe to a class the fire ant. You could do it one of two ways, one involves giving them a description of the fire ant:

//The fire ant has seven distinctive body parts: the head, body, abdomen, leg, mandible, antenna, and eye. The fire ant has six legs, and two eyes and antenna.//

The other option would be to show a diagram, such as: The diagram not only shows the parts of the fire ant, it also shows the location of all the parts. The clear outlines help simplify it, the colors help identify the different parts of the body, the heading "Fire Ant" provides the context of the image, and the color key names the parts of the fire ant without cluttering the diagram. This sort of thing is clear, concise, and easily gets its point across to the audience.

Make sure that everything can be read easily
One of the most important things about creating PowerPoint presentations is to make sure that your text is easy to read. Numerous PowerPoint presentations lose their impact when the slides cannot be easily read by the audience even if they can be easily read on the creator's computer.

Which of these do you think is easier to read?

This one: Or this: Remember that when putting text in your powerpoint presentations, the colors must contrast or the text will be very difficult for the audience to read.

Using a Flowchart
One other form of visual literacy I wish to talk about is using flowcharts in a PowerPoint presentation. Much like a diagram, Flowcharts can visually explain a series of events that would often take several lines of dialogue. For example, if you wanted to create a presentation explaining the pattern of rain water from evaporation to it's return to earth, instead of making a long detailed explanation of the process that risks losing the attention of the audience, one could merely explain it using a flowchart such as:

The arrows show the order to read the text, the labels name the different stages of water, and the loops are used to repeat the different steps in the chart. Flowcharts can be used for more than just loops, they can also show a simple chain of events, or a fork in those events.

Visual Literacy is a massive part of presentations, and far too vast to be explained on one site. Feel free to look at these different sites to learn more about visual literacy, and learn how to improve your PowerPoint presentations.

[|k-8 visuals] k-8visual.info

[|Visual Literacy] www.visual-literacy.org

[|Repetition & Contrast] coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/designprin2/start.htm

[|Proximity & Alignment] coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/designprin1/start.htm