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If Lincoln had PowerPoint (and GarageBand)
Last week, I finished creating a presentation to demonstrate to our students that slides don’t need bullet points or templates or clipart.
Peter Norvig’s wonderfully awful Gettysburg Address PowerPoint inspired the idea. He imagined what it might look like if Lincoln used PowerPoint to present his famous speech.
After sharing Norvig’s awful slides with our students, I wondered how it would have looked if Lincoln had better skills.
Students immediately saw the difference between Norvig’s slides and those I prepared (though they had legitimate criticism of mine, as well).
What was the point?
In this activity I was trying to demonstrate several ideas: ideas about slide design, ideas about public speaking:
- That you can break the rules of presentation software. You should! Just because template design options appear, doesn’t mean we have to use them. We can, we should, be more creative than the software.
- That you can use your voice dramatically, as a tool.
- That you shouldn’t be afraid to use such old-fashioned rhetorical devices as refrain or repetition or parallelism.
- That Copyright-Friendly image portals can lead you to millions of pretty cool images. We can do better than clipart.
- That presentations do not require bullets. They make people either sleepy or anxious.
- That when you do need to use text, choice of font matters.
- That we can lose the cool we sometimes live in to get completely lost in selling ideas, telling stories, presenting passionately.
- That you can use as many or as few slides as it takes. Pacing matters.
- That the slides are for our audience, not for us.
- That this is really all about us telling our stories.
This project follows up on the ten years of frustrations I shared in a recent post PowerPoint Reform: A First Chapter. It incorporates resources collected in our PowerPoint Reform Wiki. It seems I was not alone in my frustration. I sent the idea out in a recent newsletter and teachers from nearly every department expressed interest.
Of course, the Gettysburg Address lives as an example of powerful and inspiring oratory. It has a literary quality and pacing that transcends any software. The speech was not intended as a business or academic presentation.
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But what if we ask, what if we demand, our students add just a little bit of old fashioned oration to their presentations? What if we ask them to drop their cool for just a while and immerse themselves fully in artful presentation?
I am hoping that we might recreate other great speeches or monologues or soliloquies in an effort to enhance students’ presentation and speech techniques. That we might even save this enhanced rhetoric and use it as a learning tool for activities relating to history and literature, as well as speech. I would love to see the various different interpretations students might make of classic speech.
The reform campaign, begun by myself and our tech coach Ken Rodoff (who is currently a little busy with his twin babies) is turning into a full-school initiative.
Our teachers are already sold.
We walked around and helped as students were producing presentations to accompany their persuasive essays. We noticed how engaged they were in searching for the very best images in Flickr’s Creative Commons Pool. They searched, as we suggested, for concepts rather than things. For adjectives rather than nouns. We had them focus on using words to creatively representate ideas using image generator tools. As a result their backgrounds became more conceptual, less literal.
They asked us (and each other) a lot of questions relating to aesthetics, slide design, and impact. And on the speaking front, we noticed that students were practicing.
At the end of this week, we saw the first of our students’ new presentations. According to one 8th grade teacher, we have a long way yet to go, but the presentations are 100% better than last year.
No one fell asleep.
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About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
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