PowerPoint (.ppt) slide shows are used emphasize key points and organize short singular ideas for presentation to the audience. They are easy to create, edit and reuse. With a little more effort, pictures and video can also be included in a PowerPoint file. Typically, bullets of key points are presented as visuals accompanying verbal elaboration by the presenter. Embedding long paragraphs of explanation does not make the best use of PowerPoint presentation because it is difficult for students to digest a long passage and listen to the instructor at the same time.

Since PowerPoint is limited to a linear progression and to a small area for expressing each idea, use PowerPoint slides when an idea can be self-contained in one slide and a set of ideas can be sequentially presented. The nature of PowerPoint slides makes them unsuitable for presenting deep hierarchies and long explanations. If you choose to use PowerPoint slides to teach these structures, provide the students a reminder of the conceptual view of the topic, either as course printouts, a consistent menu on each slide or flipping back to the overview after every elaboration.

PowerPoint works hand in hand with verbal elaborations to enforce an idea. In an online course, the verbal part of the equation may be replaced by a synchronised audio recording or with text details. If you have lots of text to display and it cannot be synthesized into bullet points, use of a text document would be more effective. Traditional 35mm slide shows used in the classroom, such as those used in landscape architecture, art history, or medicine can be converted for online presentation. These pictures can be digitized and presented with accompanying text or audio narration. The methods used are identical to those for PowerPoint slides except for the pictorial source.

In an online course, PowerPoint is most effective when accompanied by voice narration. It is recommended that you provide printouts of the slides. This allows students to take notes while viewing the presentation. The following options allow you to deliver multimedia PowerPoint presentations online.

• A simple way to add the audio element to a set of PowerPoint slides is to record an accompanying audio for the students to listen to while they are following along with the lecture notes. This accompanying audio may not synchronize automatically with the slides.
• Breeze is a plugin for the PowerPoint application which enables you to record and synchronize your audio presentation with the slides. Breeze generates a relatively small Flash movie (.swf) which can be played on the almost-universal Flash plugin installed in most browsers. MSU has a Breeze server and a streaming server for the creation and distribution of these lecture presentations.
• Camtasia is a desktop recording application used to record and edit every action on the computer monitor. You could record your PowerPoint presentation together with audio and/or video input. Camtasia takes a little more time to master, but it is more versatile in that it is not tied to PowerPoint. It records any on-screen movements at a variety of screen sizes. The file sizes it creates are slightly larger than the ones created by Breeze.
• SofTV synchronizes a video or audio recording with PowerPoint slides with the help of recording professionals at IVS. The result is a streaming media (Real media) file hosted on the MSU streaming server.

Following are some ways to distributed your PowerPoint slide-only files.

• Export your PowerPoint to a PDF file. This might require special software. The PDF format retains your original formating and makes it easy for students to print the file, but may require a PDF reader. PDF can only handle print material and not other forms of multimedia content such as video.
• PowerPoint files can be uploaded to a server for students to download. Students may need to install a free PowerPoint reader to be able to view the slides.
• Export the PowerPoint to HTML (a folder containing text, images and links) and upload that folder to a server. The pages are not easy to consolidate and print, but the students can view the presentation slide by slide.
• Outlines of PowerPoint slides can also be saved into an RTF (Rich Text Format) and be read by most word processors. Some word processors, however, will not be able to decode any pictures or movies included in the original file.

MSU Example
AP-ECON instructors Byron W. Brown and Carl Liedholm use brief video overviews and PowerPoint slides plus a small video lecture for each week. Students can choose to view slides only, or video plus slides. The video is synchronized with the slides, so slides automatically change at appropriate points in the lecture. Students also have controls to jump from slide to slide, regardless of which slide the video is discussing. Students can also click on a button to jump the video to play the appropriate chunk for a slide they are viewing.

These pages contain some good advice on PowerPoint presentations:

• Top Ten Slide Tips by Garr Reynolds, a professor of presentation design, who also maintain the site Presentation Zen.
• Microsoft's guide on Formatting Slides and Presentations
• The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about PowerPoint Abuse

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