Centre for eLearning Newsletter
Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is no longer just a tool used by staff or students to structure or supplement oral presentations. These days you may be asked to explain a project to senior staff, talk to students at Open Day or present your research findings to your co-workers and creating an engaging presentation isn’t always easy. In addition, there are a lot of features within PowerPoint that are under-utilised or simply not used at all. Having said that, the Death by PowerPoint syndrome and PowerPointlessness is something we've all experienced. PowerPoint is one of those tools that should be used with discretion if it is to be used effectively. In this issue we’d like to focus on different ways in which you can embed multimedia within PowerPoint. We’ll cover general design concepts plus show you some useful ways in which you can reduce the size of your files to ensure that your students are able to easily download your slides. You may even find it useful to pass this information on to your students so that they can explore alternative ways to enhance their presentations using multimedia. This newsletter is broken up into a number of sections: •
Six Design Tips to improve your PowerPoint presentations
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How to insert audio into PowerPoint
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How to embed a YouTube video into PowerPoint
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Reduce your PowerPoint file sizes - your students will thank you for it!
If you have any additional PowerPoint related tips that you'd like to share with us, or would like to suggest a future newsletter topic, feel free to email us at the Centre for eLearning.
Centre for eLearning Newsletter
Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Six Tips to Improve your PowerPoint The purpose of good design is to ensure that the end product is attractive to the eye, structured and consistent. However, when creating effective PowerPoint slides, the look and feel of your slides should not detract (or distract) from the meaning of your presentation. It is vital to present your slides in the clearest and most effective way. PowerPoint is a very powerful tool for doing this, but there are a few rules to always keep in mind when creating a new presentation. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
PowerPoint is NOT the whole presentation Images are better than bullet points Learn to love white space Limit your fonts Have consistency to your design Colour, colour blindness and complementary colours
1. PowerPoint is NOT the whole presentation PowerPoint is a tool that should supplement or enhance your presentation. Its most effective use is to complement what you are saying by highlighting your points with an image, diagram or a few bullet points. A good PowerPoint presentation would (and should be) useless without you speaking to it. If you like, you can provide notes with your presentation to download or take away, and these can be more comprehensive. 2. Images are better than bullet points Remembering that PowerPoint should ENHANCE your presentation, why not forgo the overused bullet points and instead illustrate the point you are making with an image? Images are very powerful and can deliver a message with more impact than, dare we say, a succession of bullet points. However, be careful with the use of clipart as it can look less professional than a photograph. If you are using clipart, try sourcing it from somewhere other than the PowerPoint library, they have all been seen before. Try to find high resolution, quality images that are in the same style. There are plenty which you can access and purchase online. Alternatively, take your digital camera and start building up your own image library. Or again, there are plenty of photographic images available online that you can download for free. However, make sure you check the conditions of use before downloading images off the net and be aware of the copyright implications. Below are some image sites that provide free images: • •
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stock.xchng: http://www.sxc.hu/ Stock Vault: http://www.stockvault.net/ Dreamstime: http://www.dreamstime.com/free-photos
Centre for eLearning Newsletter
Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Diagrams and charts are also great to illustrate a point or topic. It's much easier for your audience to understand your data if presented in an illustrative manner. However, not too much information! Restrict simple bar charts to 8 bars, pie charts to 6 slices and ensure that all diagrams or charts have clear, easy to read labels (or a legend/key). If you need to show more complicated material then provide it as a handout and direct your audience to it while giving your presentation. No more than one graphic image or chart per slide is a good rule.
3. Learn to love white space White (or negative) space is very important in design. It helps to make your slide more comfortable to look at and directs your eye to the most important elements.. It changes the dynamics of a composition and gives your slide more impact and visual strength. It also makes your text much easier to read and gives the eye somewhere to 'rest'. So, the less clutter the better and if it's not relevant to the topic then it shouldn't be there. Text needs lots of space between lines and paragraphs to be comfortably read.
4. Limit your fonts There are many wonderful and varied fonts available and it's very easy to get carried away with your choices, but keep in mind that a fancy, serif, drop shadowed, red font may not be legible when projected on a screen in all its glory! Also, lots of different fonts look cluttered and are hard to read within a design and can detract from a professional look and feel. The best rules when using fonts within PowerPoint are:
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Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
• •
Don't go below 18 point and ideally aim for 24 point Use only san-serif fonts
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Use no more than 2 font families in your whole presentation Don't use uppercase for titles, or anywhere really, it's hard for the eye to read.
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Put space between your lines Don't use red, again, it's hard to read.
For more on legibility this is a great page to visit: http://www.tomontheweb2.ca/CMX/4D5E2/ 5: Have consistency within your design
When designing your PowerPoint slides, make sure that the background design, fonts and image style are carried through all of your slides by make use of the 'Master Slide' and 'Themes' within PowerPoint. This will give you a cohesive, professional look, and will also save you a lot of time creating your slides as, once done, it will automatically carry through to each slide. For example, if you decide you don't like a font, change it once on your Slide Master and it will carry throughout all of your slides. PowerPoint provides plenty of themes, but if you want to do something your audience hasn't seen a thousand times you can download professional templates online, or create your own. Here are some websites that provide purchase of professional templates and also some free to download: • •
http://www.presentationload.com/ http://www.templateswise.com/
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Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
http://www.free-power-point-templates.com/ http://www.presentationpro.com/
6: Colour, colour blindness and complementary colours
Knowledge of colour theory can help you to pick appropriate colours for your presentation. Warm colours, red, yellow and orange, will appear to come towards you while cool colours, blue, green and purple, will recede. Then, complementary colours come in to play. Some colours are uncomfortable to look at together and some are just hard to read. An example of colour combinations that can be hard to look at are the colours that appear diagonally across from one another on the colour wheel. These are called complementary colours.
Be very careful when combining these colours as you might end up giving your audience a headache! Another point to consider is that if you are presenting in a dark room then a dark background with white or light text will work well. But if you plan to keep most of the lights on (which is probably advisable) then an off-white background with black or dark text works much better. Red text, in general, is very hard to read, especially in large blocks. Whilst it can make headings stand out you should use it sparingly with text. It is also difficult for some people to see, which leads us to the issue of colour blindness. More males than females have colour vision problems and the usual colours they have difficulty with are greens, reds, yellows and oranges. When designing your presentation this must be taken into account. Generally rules of thumb are:
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• • • •
Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Make sure you have excellent contrast with your background and foreground colours Red and green together can turn into one colour for some viewers, which again makes it impossible to see Don’t use gradients to mark change in information. For example, a graduation from red to green, to show stop to go, may not be seen Make sure you use other visual cues besides colour to emphasise key points e.g. contrast, labels and arrows.
If you want to check that your slides contain enough contrast for people with colour blindness you may like to use the online website Vischeck.
Centre for eLearning Newsletter
Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
How to insert audio into PowerPoint Adding audio to your PowerPoint slides can create an extra dimension for audience. Sound is a powerful medium, and the incorporation of small sound bites as slide transitions, relevant spoken word or narration, and music or sound effects can all conjure vivid mental images and generate strong interest. Audio can be drawn from your own recordings, collections, or the Internet, but if you are using someone else’s audio, don’t forget to pay attention to copyright issues! More information on copyright is available at Curtin's Copyright website. It is a good idea to copy any sound files you want to use in your PPTX presentation into the same folder as your presentation. By having everything in the one folder you’ll have the option to zip the folder, send to others, or deliver your PowerPoint presentation without needing Internet connectivity. By making sure audio is in the same folder as your presentation slides before you add the sounds files to your presentation, you will ensure the prevention of possible link problems. Here’s how to add a sound file: 1. Open up your PowerPoint file and go to the slide you want to insert your audio into. 2. On the Insert tab, in the Media Clips group, click the arrow under Sound.
3. Do one of the following: o Click Sound from File, locate the folder that contains the file, and then double-click the file that you want to add. o Click Sound from Clip Organizer, scroll to find the clip that you want in the Clip Art task pane, and then click it to add it to the slide. o You can also put a CD in the tray and choose “Play CD Audio Track” in the same menu to play from the CD. o Click Record Sound – you can also record a sound from scratch if you want, however you will need to have a microphone connected to your computer to do this.
When you insert a sound, you are prompted with a message asking how you want the sound to start: automatically (Automatically) or when you click the sound (When Clicked).
Centre for eLearning Newsletter
Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Select the option you want and your sound will be inserted into your slides. A little sound icon will appear in the middle of your slide. If you want to listen to your sound, simply double-click on it. Please Note: If you add multiple sounds to the same slide, your inserted sound icons will appear on top of each other without you realising. So remember to move them around your slide so you can see (and click on) all your icons easily.
More information about adding sounds to PowerPoint 2007 is available at the Microsoft Office web site.
Centre for eLearning Newsletter
Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
How to embed a YouTube video into your presentation The following shows you how to embed a YouTube video so it plays in its own window in one of your PowerPoint slides. The video file would still be hosted on YouTube, so you would still require an Internet connection for it to play. Embedding a YouTube video is a little bit complex, but it is easily achievable by working through the step-by-step process below. One way to easily insert YouTube videos into PowerPoint is by using the YouTube Video Wizard (freeware). Simply provide the URL to your YouTube video and the Video Wizard will take care of the rest. Turn on the Developer Tab Before you can embed a YouTube video into a PowerPoint 2007 presentation, you'll need to make sure that the Developer tab, as shown in the image below, is present on the PowerPoint ribbon.
For instructions on how to turn on the Developer tab visit the Microsoft website. Embedding a YouTube Video Click on the slide where you wish to add the YouTube video. 1. Open the Developer tab and click on the More Controls button as shown in the screenshot below.
2. In the More Controls, scroll down and select Shockwave Flash Object. Click OK.
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3.
Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Left-click and hold to draw a rectangular image on your slide. I’m using a little YouTube clip which shows an explanation of Blackboard, so I put an appropriate title above my Flash Object window.
4. Right-click on your rectangular image and select Properties. 5. In this Properties window (shown below left), we’ll have to make a few changes and additions to embed a YouTube video. These changes and additions are reflected in the right-hand image below. a. Although this is optional, it’s a good idea to change the title of your object in the (Name) field. While not completely necessary, this will help later on if you plan to embed several videos within one presentation. b. The most important addition to make is to add the URL of the YouTube video to the Movie field. You will have to make a couple of changes here to ensure that your video plays correctly. In our example, we are adding a video of a first grader explaining Blackboard. The original URL of this video on YouTube is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCxeSSHRyKs Before adding this URL to the Movie field, delete the “watch?” text and replace the “=” with a “/” character. The resulting URL would look like this:
http://www.youtube.com/v/sCxeSSHRyKs
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Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
6. Other changes you can make in the Properties window: a. Play the video only once by changing the Loop field to False b. Start the video manually by changing the Playing field to False 7. Close the Properties window to save your changes. Press the F5 key on your keyboard to preview your presentation. Don’t forget that you’ll need an internet connection in order to play the YouTube video. Note: information for embedding a YouTube video in PowerPoint 2007 was referenced from http://www.brighthub.com/computing/windows-platform/articles/9698.aspx
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Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Reduce the size of your PowerPoint slides If you want to know how to compress your lecture slides, follow these steps depending on whether you are using: •
Microsoft Office / PowerPoint 2003
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Microsoft Office / PowerPoint 2007
Microsoft Office / PowerPoint 2003 Step 1 Open up your PowerPoint slides. Step 2 Scroll to your first image and double click it. Step 3 A popup box will appear and on the Picture tab, click Compress…
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Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Step 4 In the Compress Pictures window which pops up, select the radio buttons All pictures in document and Web/Screen. Also make sure that both Options (Compress pictures and Delete cropped areas of pictures) are ticked. Click OK.
Step 5 You will see a warning message letting you know that this will reduce the quality of your images. If you want to continue, simply hit Apply and this should compress your images within PowerPoint. Check your file sizes before and after to see how much of a difference compressing your pictures can make.
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Issue 16 – Engage your students using multimedia within PowerPoint
Microsoft Office 2007 Step 1: Open up your PowerPoint file.
Step 2: Scroll to your first image and double click it. You will see a ‘Picture Tools’ ribbon appear at the top of your screen.
Step 3: Select Compress Pictures and a pop up box will appear.
Click on the Options… button.
Step 4: Under Compression Settings – select the E-mail (96 ppi) : minimize document size for sharing radio button and hit OK.
Step 5: Hit OK again and this should reduce the size of your PowerPoint slides. Check your file sizes before and after to see how much of a difference compressing your pictures can make.
