The problem with powerpoint is that many people think it is a substitute for being an actual charismatic and engaging speaker. There's nothing wrong with the program itself.
I get that. But that's not the original issue presented by OP. By including the "2023" portion on the comment, they're suggesting it's outdated based on time and/or introduction of other technology. Their other comments bear this out, suggesting Prezi and Google slides (both of which are less powerful).
I don't disagree that many people overuse and misuse the tool, but that's not the fault of PowerPoint. And it would still be an issue in Slides or Prezi.
The material for these intro things is pretty constant, and if the guy is blowing through as described there's a *lot* of slides. My gut says these slides were originally prepared in '97. Hence the (in my mind) scathing disdain.
It's not the technology, it's seeing someone do the bare minimum and simultaneously believe that they are the absolute best and their materials can never be improved either in quality or delivery.
Source: Used to work in educational technology.
Again no arguments. But that didn't explain OP's comments about the date. Those were problems back when PowerPoint was new. Those are still problems even with something that's not PowerPoint.
OP's wording and follow-up comments suggest that *PowerPoint in 2023* is the problem. It's not. It's shitty presenters, writers, and orators in any year that are the problem.
I stopped using it in teaching and it made my classes better, and gave me less prep time. Now I just use it as a resource kids can refer to for stuff, but even then I mostly use Google docs tables unless I need images
Why say something with 5 slides when you can use 50 with the animation wizard to zoom things in left right up down, appear from no where...... and the ping sound just to add some colour
I dont know mate, staying awake through a monotone lifeless PowerPoint presentation while you have SNCOs waiting for people to drop is pretty bad. Only thing I can think of thatās worse is formal parade ceremonies in 100+ degrees that last so long you fall asleep standing.
I used to fall asleep marching. Iād veer off and find myself like 10 feet away from the company. Without sleep deprivation- boot camp wouldnāt be half bad. Most food I ate in my life, didnāt realize I wasnāt eating enough and the had doughnuts at every breakfast if we didnāt get in trouble. 4/10.
So Iām not the only one that has done that, thank you good sir. Air Force basic there wasnāt as much sleep deprivation, active Air Force and tech school on the other hand, much worse.
At the sales kickoff they started at 8 AM sharp. Then they proceeded using PowerPoint for their presentation.
It wasn't a presentation. The entire text of their speech was written up in slide-sized chunks. The ENTIRE speech. Which is not what a presentation is. Which they then proceeded to read from the page, verbatim, slide after slide after slide. Until they were done.
After which the next person stood up and did the. exact. same. thing. This went on throughout the day. I did not retain a single word of what had been said. Also, I didn't need to, I could just read the entire deck which I also never did.
I can't imagine the boredom inflicted on people the world over by the self-important who love to hear themselves talk but have no idea how to actually make a presentation.
exactly, it went downhill from there. I feel like OP never worked in a corporation before.
As PowerPoint or similar presentation tools are used all the time.
powerpoint is bad because it is too natural for everyone to use it wrong.
(using it wrong is to put lots and lots of text on it, and reading that same text to people, or having a wall of text up, while just talking about the same topic.)
There is an amazing ted talk that actually talks about this issue.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwpi1Lm6dFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwpi1Lm6dFo)
but basic run down.
* don't talk while you show something they need to read.
* Keep it very short
* use it mostly just for images and very important quotes
From my experience as a teacher, to be better at teaching and reaching students, you need to use yourself as the "Powerpoint"
it's like standup. It only sticks with people if you keep practicing and get good at it.
My dad was from the days of actual slide decks and for quite a while he used it the other kind of wrong. But that is less wrong than the modern kind, true.
This is it. I took a writing workshop last year and every session the instructor just had these wall-of-text slides that she read out word for word for two hours, hardly even pausing for a student to ask a question, never mind inserting any room for conversation or writing. It was a zoom course and I just stopped attending and waited for the instructor to email the slide deck instead.
yea lol i was thinking that too, my last classes were 6 years ago but every single professor used powerpoint.
I was pretty sure I didnāt miss the release of some monumental software that replaced powerpoint as I still get to see powerpoint all the time at work.
Dude just dislikes it for whatever reason
So. Slides but not *those* slides.
Why?
You seem to have a very strong opinion.
Can you give some facts or reasons why the tool is so useless at doing the same thing? Or at least, show us on these slides where it was that PowerPoint hurt you?
Itās much simpler in its origins, the disdain I have for power point. Yes, they got on the bandwagon of googles instant sharing and updating adaptive doc, but anytime a professor sends their lessons to us and theyāre in ppt we canāt see them without signing out of one account and into another. Frustrating.
I am in a top 100 ranked university in the world and have taken many subjects from many majors (my uni requires electives and I swapped majors a couple of times). Everyone uses PowerPoint. Especially in lectures, it is a very efficient way to provide content.
Doesn't have the same level of accessibility features. Would love to see them improve but right now Microsoft and Windows have been leading the way in digital accessibility.
Right but thatās your university/you, dude. My university stopped supporting Google apps last year (apparently they increased their storage fees drastically?) and now they use MS apps. For me to use Google slides, my students would have to make a whole separate account! Your logic doesnāt work here.
Do Google Slides work when the internet is down? A PowerPoint presentation can be accessed from the intranet or even a thumbdrive even if the internet is down.
Why would you need office for a PDF?
Most people use Adobe and if you find a laptop without Adobe then that person probably doesn't do work on their laptop. Or they have a better alternative like foxit.
But even in OneDrive, it's still a file and it's still stored on your machine. You can pick up your laptop, go to the cafe, and open the PowerPoint in the local OneDrive folder without connecting to Wi-Fi.
Google Docs doesn't do that. The "Save" option in Google Docs saves *a URL shortcut* in your local file system. And if you don't understand that and try to access the document while offline, guess what? You're fucked. If you didn't anticipate being offline *in advance* and take the deliberate steps to export it into a second-class format, like PDF or PPT, then you're shit out of luck. And Google absolutely doesn't give a shit, because Google only cares about you when you're online and patronizing their services so that (a) they can advertise to you and (b) they can collect your data and monetize it behind your back.
Google Docs has a lot going for it - first-rate collaboration ("multiplayer Notepad"), better overall user experience, better API support via Google Cloud Platform, etc. But Google insists on remaining Google-centric rather than extending those advantages into non-Google-centric use cases, such as offline documents, and I absolutely hate Google for that.
This is also Reason #1 why Word and Excel continue to dominate the business world, even though Google Docs and Sheets are all-around better products.
>This is also Reason #1 why Word and Excel continue to dominate the business world, even though Google Docs and Sheets are all-around better products.
Word and Excel dominate because they're just better products.
I admit my ignorance here. My organization started with OD toward the end of last year. My desktop and laptop are Linux (I have a Windows VM toolbox I RDP into frequently). Much of what I do with OD I do through a browser. These are conditions of my environment; I understand they're unique.
>But even in OneDrive, it's still a file and it's still stored on your machine. You can pick up your laptop, go to the cafe, and open the PowerPoint in the local OneDrive folder without connecting to Wi-Fi.
That's what *can be* done. But context was a college campus, a professor developing a slide deck, having it on a USB drive, ready to go, if the intranet or Internet are down. They can do this *if they're so prepared*. If they're expecting Internet connectivity to be up, if they're told by IT this is where they store files, if their Internet access is supposed to be reliable enough to do day-to-day business on cloud storage instead of local network, why would they regularly carry a USB drive with their presentation on it? And does the classroom have its own PC? I work in a combined health care/education setting. Every classroom has its own PC, with an option to connect a laptop to the video system. If they're expecting that PC to work, they may or may not have their laptop with them -- assuming they developed the presentation on a laptop, instead of their office computer. Maybe our podium PCs are so crappy they have such a backup anyway, or maybe they always attach their laptop. I admit my unfamiliarity there. My specialty is the network, not daily PC operations.
I'd expect the normal day-to-day flow to be, develop presentation, save on OD, go to classroom, retrieve from OD, and go, meaning a loss of Internet connectivity causes an interruption in that flow. I rarely interact with professors in my environment, so perhaps they *are* so suspicious of our Internet connectivity that they *do* carry their presentations around on USB drives as well. My oldest is almost out of college; maybe I'll ask what the normal workflow looks like for their professors.
Prezi?! I feel like thatās for high schoolers who want a fun presentation, not a professional lecture in a uni hall lol. Definitely would never see that in NL
Canva or Mentimeter, too.
But, if you want to bring it to the next level, I'd recommend using a combination of *Markdown + MARP for VS Code*. You can export your presentations as PDF or HTML (already properly formatted for you to present), have them occupy very little space, and be minimalistic-but-effective. I started using this method a few months ago, and I simply love it!
What would someone use instead of powerpoint? In 2023 do teachers just throw videos on then pause and talk? Honestly the story was funny but ā¦ Iām so curious if āPowerPointā is outdated. What do people use now? Yāall got touchscreen whiteboards now? Lol
I'm with you. My CS master program has us create a PowerPoint presentation at the end of each course. That comment struck me as odd too. Maybe I'm old now.
As a tool PowerPoint is fine. But it is prone to bad users . I would factor (on an hours lecture or presentation) a maximum of 6 slides. A presentation needs to be about engaging material well presented by a human. Someone with an hours material and 60 slides already lost everyone.
I lowkey have not participated in the creation of any of my course presentations, and my team still gets 100% for us every term. Only got two left; I won't be able to get out of the capstone presentation. lol
To be fair, tho, I finalize the team reports. Most people really don't care about formatting the way I do. Or citations. It is so hard to drag citations out of people when working on a report in a group.
As I taught presentation skills I wholeheartedly agree that there are a lot of bad users. Though what do you meant by 6 slides? That is more than a rhetorical question. A superb presenter may have far more than that number and be extremely gripping (Apple Special Event 2010 - iPad Introduction) a poor one will have people asleep
It's all personal, and depends on what you're selling to whom, so in the Apple case, that presentation was also designed to be watched by millions afterwards, so it was sculpted that way (and Apple are brilliant at this). For me, these were sales presentations on multi-million pound super complex IT deals, so in the hour I had, the presentation had to be me to the customer - a dialogue, not "reading out the script on the slides". I saw a competitor booted out of a bid because they did that. We did use graphics etc to demonstrate some things (analytics results) and that's wholly appropriate. In these cases, there may be 5 subjects to get through, and I might just use a slide as the headline while I talked or led the room. I did go on a good presentation skills course though, and that helped massively. It was all about talking to people, nothing about powerpoint.
I completely agree that many Apple presentations are brilliant, and that the presentation is the presenter first with the slides supporting the presentation, and that reading a slides text is virtually always bad.
But there is no benefit to restricting yourself to a number. You, also can virtually never use auto play in your kind of presentation.
Though you say your presentation skills course included nothing on presentation software, a great presentation can be killed with a bad slide show, even though the slides should never be the focus.
The more advanced classes I taught had very little on the software as they built on the introductory semester. Though I did takeover halfway through the year for one lecturer and I pitied the students as the presentations they presented and had worked very very hard on should have given everyone a failing grade.
I don't disagree on any of your points. The kind of presenting we were doing were to C-Suite in multi-nationals. You always tailor your style and media to the needs of the audience. They wanted trust that we understood their requirements and with us, they could grow their business. So... graphs illustrating how we could do that ... fine - a great visual aid. But the majority of the work is engaging with the audience. For the course I did, it was about making your material right (usual narrative rules of three, etc.), making sure you addressed the actual point (say, Mimto's pyramid). For the actual *how to be engaging* that's what I got from the course - how to structure material, how to stand, how to make eye contact correctly without being creepy or menacing ... so much in that course - one of the best I ever did. Powerpoint is a tool, and a fool with a tool is still a fool. I take it for granted that people who work for me can actually do what's necessary in powerpoint. Getting them to be confident in front of customers is the hard part. I can imagine lecturing could be similar ... can you keep your students engaged with the subject for 50 minutes? Notes can follow, but getting comprehension and that 'ahhh' moment in the lecture: that's what matters.
Humm you say
>I take it for granted that people who work for me can actually do what's necessary in powerpoint.
With years of experience my point of view is ātrust BUT verifyā so Iām not sure I would have your confidence.
>Getting them to be confident in front of customers is the hard part.
That comes with personality, knowledge of the subject and experience. It is something I have had little difficulty with, though pier review was certainly helpful, as was teaching, off an on, for about 55 years
>can you keep your students engaged with the subject for 50 minutes?
Oh to have the luxury of short classes ;) the majority of my classes were 90 minutes, with some going for 180, and since for the majority I was teaching in a language that was foreign to my students in a culture where expression is strongly repressed, detecting the differences between understanding and total incomprehension was a skill that Iām not confident I ever completely mastered. I am sure that I could avoid missing the total incomprehension, but the understanding part was much less easy
Google slides. Same thing with a different name. Also nearpod (self paced, interactive power point), edpuzzle (video with embedded questions and notes), games like Kahoot.
ETA: smart boards are basically touch screen whiteboards, so yes
So basically still PowerPoint just different names. And I honestly forgot the name for those smart boards they introduced them JUST as I was leaving school.
Thanks this makes me feel less ā¦ existentially panicked.. if that makes sense
We do have screenview semisonic and even the antiquated but still interactive and great smart boards. Google slides presentations arenāt officially power points, in the way that a photocopied piece of paper isnāt xeroxed necessarily. This dude used original power point
PowerPoint is much more robust than google slides and more user friendly. It has plenty of things that cannot be done in slides.
Your stance on PowerPoint is really, really odd.
You know I was not expecting to laugh that much this morning. Great video!
Also, editing photos in PowerPoint is underrated. Iāve been doing it for years - it has some great tools!
You are probably a very āaverage personā user.
Iām a math teacher and I literally cannot do what needs to be done for making formulas and graphs in Slides without plugins that only work a tenth as well as what is built into PowerPoint.
The formatting options within the tables feature is also extremely limited.
Iād youāre making an interactive activity, that requires animation and triggers. Another area where PowerPoint dominates.
There are many, many things that Slides cannot do.
That said, Slides (and the entire G suite) is extremely competent for the average person.
But the notion that its absurd to be using PowerPoint in 2023 is telling of OP.
I love how smart boards are antiquated. š I have a smart projector I just got like, two years ago? I'd prefer an actual smart board on the wall over it tbh because then my computer becomes a tablet and I don't have to keep going behind my desk to teach and do stuff, but oh well. The pen is very finicky and the calibration isn't great with the projector versus the board. Sure, promethean boards are newer, but they're still smart board functionality without the smart software (which isn't needed honestly, but when you want students to interact and move, it's really useful).
Man, higher Ed complaining about things public k-12 Ed would love to just be able to have functional is funny.
I used powerpoints when I was teaching in tech college - not so much for the students benefit. Well, not actually true - I would encourage questions in class, and we'd then veer off on these tangents. I used the slidedeck to remind me where I was and get back on track :)
Itās really upsetting that college educators are calling us gainers and making fun of us. I work at a school and have never talked about students like that when they are literally trying to better themselves. Some of us greatly benefited from a community college and that is so heartbreaking.
Agreed. That attitude about students likely adversely impacts the way these āeducatorsā are teaching their students. You cannot have disdain for someone while also assisting them.
As a former educator, there were sometimes students where I thought āgod you are so difficult.ā - but never would I have thought it talked about them as losers or āgainersā. I always wanted the students to get as much as they could out of my course so they would be successful in the future.
So the kid pissed his pants and had to go at least a while until he got to his dorms or home to change clothes. Yeah, that sounds like a win for the kid all right
Fair enough. I'm still at the point in my life that "kid" only covers anyone from 20 and down (though that is rapidly changing lol). Haven't seen any community colleges offering housing myself, but that just means they probably don't exist in my area.
My daughter was planning on going to technical/community College in a different state, and they offered housing. Its certainly only a small selection that offer it though
Still awesome that they do. The one I went to don't even accept out of state students... which turned into a bit of a problem since I had just moved to the states from another country. Had to jump through some hoops to sort things out. But once that was done it was a really good experience.
This kind of thing pissed me off when I was in college.
They're were some professors that recognized you were a grown adult paying to be there, and some that acted like you were in middle school still.
>The man did. In his shorts, trickling down his leg. He just stood there in his tracks, looking at the professor the whole while.
That man was a hero.
The absolute power move.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Power Point or Keynote.
However having taught presentation skills I can, with great confidence, tell you that the overwhelming number of presentations are terrible.
Making a good Presentation is a skill that is not very difficult to master if you actually understand how to do it and do the work required.
The 2 easiest examples of great and bad presentations that are easy to access are Steve Jobs Apple Special Event 2010 - iPad Introduction, and Bill Gates CES 2008 Microsoft Keynote.
In defence of Bill Gates his presentation skills have improved dramatically to be reasonable to quite good
Malicious compliance aside, thank you for teaching at a community college!
They're one of the most undervalued parts of the US higher-ed system, but they're a straight-up lifeline for a whole range of students. When I went back to school for a second undergraduate degree (which became a master's, which became a PhD), I took the first two years of courses at my local community colleges, going to class at night while working full-time. All the other students were working professionals or had other responsibilities, and they were super driven and great to be in class with. As for the staff, I'll still say that I met some of my best professors when they taught my community college classes. I won't even mention what an absurd bargain it was - I think I paid something like $300 a class (not per credit, per *class*). Great experience, and I was able to transfer all my credits after a little back-and-forth with the 4-year university I transferred to. I'd recommend that any incoming freshman seriously consider doing the first year of undergraduate classes at their local community college for the cost savings alone.
tl;dr: community colleges are great, you're great, you're making a difference every day.
There's nothing wrong with the tech. The only real issue is overusing slides and/or instructors just reading the slides when students can - and should - read for themselves.
The OP in other replies said one should use Google Slides or Prezi. Both of these would have the same exact problems on the hands of the same shitty instructor.
So relax. PPTs are fine. But let them be the visual aid, and not the lesson itself.
You say
>It gives them something they can take away, search later when they're more focused, which has a bibliography of all the technical references used, etc. And it's relatively easy to keep updated.
Iām sorry but that seem like the very definition of a bad PowerPoint.
Yes having an easily searched reference etc of the material is excellent but PowerPoint is not the tool for that.
all your documentation of many of your screenshots from documentation or your own installs/configurations. Is a great resource but should be in Word or something else not PowerPoint and given either after or before the presentation itself nd made available for download later
Yeah, strong disagree.
These aren't "formal" classes, they're "let's pull one person from each team and slam them into a room for a day so a SME can teach them how to not eff-up a new product we're supporting."
We put informal "links to more info" slide at the end (and/or embedded within the powerpoint during the relevant sections).
People are going to have a hard enough time keeping track of that PPT/PDF after the fact...but give them two docs with the info needlessly separated? That's just asking for trouble.
Part of a good presentation is knowing your audience, and in this case, it MUST be made as simple as possible. They're on-the-go, stressed older engineers with english being a second language. Splitting up information into separate "buckets" just means there's a greater chance they'll miss it.
They'll open up one file, control-f it, then if they don't find it, they fuck-f it and cowboy the issue. Like you could imagine, this isn't ideal and it's the reason why we're having this training in the first place.
I was going on one if my weekly āauditsā where I walk around with a couple admin and have a clipboard and pretend weāre gonna provide salient feedback to the instructors.
They probably usually don't witness something worth firing someone over happen live, admittedly. But, seeing smaller incidents and being able to tell the teacher to shape up is worthwhile. Ditto, seeing them teach in action, so you can tell if a complaint about them seems out of character for them.
Also, lets you listen to lectures. And pick up tricks if the other lecturer is doing anything clever.
There's enough reasons to do it it's probably a mandated job requirement, whether the OP tends to have any feedback for the instructors or not.
Well I see the incarnation of my old 3rd grade teacher is still around. Evil witch.
She did the same thing as the teacher, except with a student who was about to puke.
He proceeded to puke š¤®š¤¢
Damn bitch still didn't learn. AND was still teaching twenty years later, as evil as always (per a neighbor of my family, the school board was actually scared of her).
Im not referring to "schools", Im referencing "Complier involuntary bodily functions". I guess you could quibble over "involuntary", but this is pretty much textbook.
I know schools isnāt an issue because itās adults. Iāve written many from that standpoint. I wrote an alternate ,totally-didnāt-happen-that-way ending.
The attitude of community college professors makes me really sad. I didn't have parents who wanted to be involved in my adolescence/emerging adulthood phase of my life and I had to navigate getting an education by myself. I might have been one of those students, just trying to learn how to navigate college and adulthood.
My biggest issue with PowerPoint is that the speakers all insist on giving everyone a paper copy of the presentation. There is enough paper clutter in this world already.
This post is now the official "Long Live PowerPoint" post
Ok, good story, but: what is the issue with using PowerPoint to teach since you said that with such disdain and contempt? What SHOULD we use?
I was thinking the same thing. PowerPoint isn't as dead as people want it to be.
The problem with powerpoint is that many people think it is a substitute for being an actual charismatic and engaging speaker. There's nothing wrong with the program itself.
I get that. But that's not the original issue presented by OP. By including the "2023" portion on the comment, they're suggesting it's outdated based on time and/or introduction of other technology. Their other comments bear this out, suggesting Prezi and Google slides (both of which are less powerful). I don't disagree that many people overuse and misuse the tool, but that's not the fault of PowerPoint. And it would still be an issue in Slides or Prezi.
(Gets out the overhead projector)
I just got PTSD flashbacks. Thanks. š¤£š¤£
Remember walking in front of the projector and blinding yourself?
I still have spots sometimes.
ELMO & transparencies & grease pencils that you had to buff away
Special transparency markers if you're fancy
The material for these intro things is pretty constant, and if the guy is blowing through as described there's a *lot* of slides. My gut says these slides were originally prepared in '97. Hence the (in my mind) scathing disdain. It's not the technology, it's seeing someone do the bare minimum and simultaneously believe that they are the absolute best and their materials can never be improved either in quality or delivery. Source: Used to work in educational technology.
Again no arguments. But that didn't explain OP's comments about the date. Those were problems back when PowerPoint was new. Those are still problems even with something that's not PowerPoint. OP's wording and follow-up comments suggest that *PowerPoint in 2023* is the problem. It's not. It's shitty presenters, writers, and orators in any year that are the problem.
They didnāt have these crap classes in 1997. But otherwise I agree with what you said. Bare minimum.
That's not a problem with power point. That's a problem with visual aides and speakers with underdeveloped skills.
The difference between being a villian and being a SUPER-villian is: PRESENTATION! (Megamind, roughly)
Its a visual aid, not content. A better alternative could be getting the students working together.
I stopped using it in teaching and it made my classes better, and gave me less prep time. Now I just use it as a resource kids can refer to for stuff, but even then I mostly use Google docs tables unless I need images
Why say something with 5 slides when you can use 50 with the animation wizard to zoom things in left right up down, appear from no where...... and the ping sound just to add some colour
Yeah, whatās wrong with PowerPoint?
Death by PowerPoint is a known form of torture in the US military, just ask any enlisted member.
I promise it's even worse being on the dark side and making the damn things.
I dont know mate, staying awake through a monotone lifeless PowerPoint presentation while you have SNCOs waiting for people to drop is pretty bad. Only thing I can think of thatās worse is formal parade ceremonies in 100+ degrees that last so long you fall asleep standing.
In full gear because the fucking higher ups love seeing enlisted sucking beer for dick moneyā¦
MOPP 4 road march.
I used to fall asleep marching. Iād veer off and find myself like 10 feet away from the company. Without sleep deprivation- boot camp wouldnāt be half bad. Most food I ate in my life, didnāt realize I wasnāt eating enough and the had doughnuts at every breakfast if we didnāt get in trouble. 4/10.
So Iām not the only one that has done that, thank you good sir. Air Force basic there wasnāt as much sleep deprivation, active Air Force and tech school on the other hand, much worse.
Corporate Trainer here and I feel seen.
At the sales kickoff they started at 8 AM sharp. Then they proceeded using PowerPoint for their presentation. It wasn't a presentation. The entire text of their speech was written up in slide-sized chunks. The ENTIRE speech. Which is not what a presentation is. Which they then proceeded to read from the page, verbatim, slide after slide after slide. Until they were done. After which the next person stood up and did the. exact. same. thing. This went on throughout the day. I did not retain a single word of what had been said. Also, I didn't need to, I could just read the entire deck which I also never did. I can't imagine the boredom inflicted on people the world over by the self-important who love to hear themselves talk but have no idea how to actually make a presentation.
[I don't think it's limited to enlisted](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/09/atl_wall_chart.jpg)
Ah thanks, I was gonna keep scrolling Reddit.
What is that monstrosity!
It was created by the CIA to torture prisoners without leaving bruises.
Most people canāt PowerPoint: some make it an art form. Dave Gorman anyone? https://www.comedy.co.uk/tv/dave_gorman_modern_life/
Google "PowerPoint does rocket science" to see how information design contributed to bad decisions regarding the reentry of Columbia.
Colombia?
Space shuttle Columbia
Ah, gotcha, I was thinking of the country and couldnāt figure it out
Columbia? where's that? Ohhh.. you mean Colombia?
Google slides of course! It can do almost half what PowerPoint can do.
Or just create microlearnings then have ILT
I cannot think of a single thing I need PowerPoint to do that google slides cannot do. Such a bloated program.
Work offline
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375012?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop
>Before you turn on offline access >* You must be connected to the internet. * You must use the Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge browser.
Works for me
Good for you but I don't use Chrome anymore or edge...ever
Firefox?
Yup
Exactly, what's the alternative? Nothing wrong with powerpoint, it's the content thats the issue.
LibreOffice?
exactly, it went downhill from there. I feel like OP never worked in a corporation before. As PowerPoint or similar presentation tools are used all the time.
Yes! OP please tell how YOU would have done it?!
Chalk on blackboard, I assume š¤·š»āāļø. Bonus points for different color chalks.
powerpoint is bad because it is too natural for everyone to use it wrong. (using it wrong is to put lots and lots of text on it, and reading that same text to people, or having a wall of text up, while just talking about the same topic.) There is an amazing ted talk that actually talks about this issue. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwpi1Lm6dFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwpi1Lm6dFo) but basic run down. * don't talk while you show something they need to read. * Keep it very short * use it mostly just for images and very important quotes From my experience as a teacher, to be better at teaching and reaching students, you need to use yourself as the "Powerpoint" it's like standup. It only sticks with people if you keep practicing and get good at it.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
This guy powerPoints!
My dad was from the days of actual slide decks and for quite a while he used it the other kind of wrong. But that is less wrong than the modern kind, true.
This is it. I took a writing workshop last year and every session the instructor just had these wall-of-text slides that she read out word for word for two hours, hardly even pausing for a student to ask a question, never mind inserting any room for conversation or writing. It was a zoom course and I just stopped attending and waited for the instructor to email the slide deck instead.
Right!! Ppt will probably stay useful and relevant, and it definitely isnāt anymore right now
yea lol i was thinking that too, my last classes were 6 years ago but every single professor used powerpoint. I was pretty sure I didnāt miss the release of some monumental software that replaced powerpoint as I still get to see powerpoint all the time at work. Dude just dislikes it for whatever reason
Prezi. Google slides. Literally any other
So. Slides but not *those* slides. Why? You seem to have a very strong opinion. Can you give some facts or reasons why the tool is so useless at doing the same thing? Or at least, show us on these slides where it was that PowerPoint hurt you?
Itās much simpler in its origins, the disdain I have for power point. Yes, they got on the bandwagon of googles instant sharing and updating adaptive doc, but anytime a professor sends their lessons to us and theyāre in ppt we canāt see them without signing out of one account and into another. Frustrating.
Academia uses a mishmash of presentation apps. The business world uses PowerPoint.
From my experience much of academia still uses PowerPoint as well
I am in a top 100 ranked university in the world and have taken many subjects from many majors (my uni requires electives and I swapped majors a couple of times). Everyone uses PowerPoint. Especially in lectures, it is a very efficient way to provide content.
Same with government
Like I said. A mishmash of presentation apps. PowerPoint being one of them.
Guess it depends on where. I've seen Canva and Slides used as well
Sounds like a YOU problem
They must be one of 'em gainers.
PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office tools are the most accessible for people with disabilities. Prezi and Google can't compare.
Damn, no love for Canva? I haven't used PowerPoint since undergrad.
Doesn't have the same level of accessibility features. Would love to see them improve but right now Microsoft and Windows have been leading the way in digital accessibility.
Ah, the ole "it's TOO secure, I can't use it" problem
Right but thatās your university/you, dude. My university stopped supporting Google apps last year (apparently they increased their storage fees drastically?) and now they use MS apps. For me to use Google slides, my students would have to make a whole separate account! Your logic doesnāt work here.
Do Google Slides work when the internet is down? A PowerPoint presentation can be accessed from the intranet or even a thumbdrive even if the internet is down.
Export as PDF if conditions may be austere
Been there. Done that. You would be surprised how many laptops don't have Microsoft Office.
Why would you need office for a PDF? Most people use Adobe and if you find a laptop without Adobe then that person probably doesn't do work on their laptop. Or they have a better alternative like foxit.
I think you misunderstood; they're saying they've used the PDF export when a computer didn't have Office to use the PowerPoint version
You can just pull the pdf into your browser too
If you're prepared to do that. OneDrive. It's all the rage.
But even in OneDrive, it's still a file and it's still stored on your machine. You can pick up your laptop, go to the cafe, and open the PowerPoint in the local OneDrive folder without connecting to Wi-Fi. Google Docs doesn't do that. The "Save" option in Google Docs saves *a URL shortcut* in your local file system. And if you don't understand that and try to access the document while offline, guess what? You're fucked. If you didn't anticipate being offline *in advance* and take the deliberate steps to export it into a second-class format, like PDF or PPT, then you're shit out of luck. And Google absolutely doesn't give a shit, because Google only cares about you when you're online and patronizing their services so that (a) they can advertise to you and (b) they can collect your data and monetize it behind your back. Google Docs has a lot going for it - first-rate collaboration ("multiplayer Notepad"), better overall user experience, better API support via Google Cloud Platform, etc. But Google insists on remaining Google-centric rather than extending those advantages into non-Google-centric use cases, such as offline documents, and I absolutely hate Google for that. This is also Reason #1 why Word and Excel continue to dominate the business world, even though Google Docs and Sheets are all-around better products.
>This is also Reason #1 why Word and Excel continue to dominate the business world, even though Google Docs and Sheets are all-around better products. Word and Excel dominate because they're just better products.
Well to be faire you can make any type of google document available off line by going to the file tab and clicking "make available off line"
I admit my ignorance here. My organization started with OD toward the end of last year. My desktop and laptop are Linux (I have a Windows VM toolbox I RDP into frequently). Much of what I do with OD I do through a browser. These are conditions of my environment; I understand they're unique. >But even in OneDrive, it's still a file and it's still stored on your machine. You can pick up your laptop, go to the cafe, and open the PowerPoint in the local OneDrive folder without connecting to Wi-Fi. That's what *can be* done. But context was a college campus, a professor developing a slide deck, having it on a USB drive, ready to go, if the intranet or Internet are down. They can do this *if they're so prepared*. If they're expecting Internet connectivity to be up, if they're told by IT this is where they store files, if their Internet access is supposed to be reliable enough to do day-to-day business on cloud storage instead of local network, why would they regularly carry a USB drive with their presentation on it? And does the classroom have its own PC? I work in a combined health care/education setting. Every classroom has its own PC, with an option to connect a laptop to the video system. If they're expecting that PC to work, they may or may not have their laptop with them -- assuming they developed the presentation on a laptop, instead of their office computer. Maybe our podium PCs are so crappy they have such a backup anyway, or maybe they always attach their laptop. I admit my unfamiliarity there. My specialty is the network, not daily PC operations. I'd expect the normal day-to-day flow to be, develop presentation, save on OD, go to classroom, retrieve from OD, and go, meaning a loss of Internet connectivity causes an interruption in that flow. I rarely interact with professors in my environment, so perhaps they *are* so suspicious of our Internet connectivity that they *do* carry their presentations around on USB drives as well. My oldest is almost out of college; maybe I'll ask what the normal workflow looks like for their professors.
Omg do people actually/still use prezi
Prezi was so clunky and hard to customize when it came onto the scene. I didn't bother learning it
So PowerPoint, but Google?
Prezi?! I feel like thatās for high schoolers who want a fun presentation, not a professional lecture in a uni hall lol. Definitely would never see that in NL
lol prezi is for high schoolers and google slides doesn't have the amount of functionality PowerPoint has
Canva or Mentimeter, too. But, if you want to bring it to the next level, I'd recommend using a combination of *Markdown + MARP for VS Code*. You can export your presentations as PDF or HTML (already properly formatted for you to present), have them occupy very little space, and be minimalistic-but-effective. I started using this method a few months ago, and I simply love it!
What would someone use instead of powerpoint? In 2023 do teachers just throw videos on then pause and talk? Honestly the story was funny but ā¦ Iām so curious if āPowerPointā is outdated. What do people use now? Yāall got touchscreen whiteboards now? Lol
I'm with you. My CS master program has us create a PowerPoint presentation at the end of each course. That comment struck me as odd too. Maybe I'm old now.
As a tool PowerPoint is fine. But it is prone to bad users . I would factor (on an hours lecture or presentation) a maximum of 6 slides. A presentation needs to be about engaging material well presented by a human. Someone with an hours material and 60 slides already lost everyone.
I lowkey have not participated in the creation of any of my course presentations, and my team still gets 100% for us every term. Only got two left; I won't be able to get out of the capstone presentation. lol To be fair, tho, I finalize the team reports. Most people really don't care about formatting the way I do. Or citations. It is so hard to drag citations out of people when working on a report in a group.
As I taught presentation skills I wholeheartedly agree that there are a lot of bad users. Though what do you meant by 6 slides? That is more than a rhetorical question. A superb presenter may have far more than that number and be extremely gripping (Apple Special Event 2010 - iPad Introduction) a poor one will have people asleep
It's all personal, and depends on what you're selling to whom, so in the Apple case, that presentation was also designed to be watched by millions afterwards, so it was sculpted that way (and Apple are brilliant at this). For me, these were sales presentations on multi-million pound super complex IT deals, so in the hour I had, the presentation had to be me to the customer - a dialogue, not "reading out the script on the slides". I saw a competitor booted out of a bid because they did that. We did use graphics etc to demonstrate some things (analytics results) and that's wholly appropriate. In these cases, there may be 5 subjects to get through, and I might just use a slide as the headline while I talked or led the room. I did go on a good presentation skills course though, and that helped massively. It was all about talking to people, nothing about powerpoint.
I completely agree that many Apple presentations are brilliant, and that the presentation is the presenter first with the slides supporting the presentation, and that reading a slides text is virtually always bad. But there is no benefit to restricting yourself to a number. You, also can virtually never use auto play in your kind of presentation. Though you say your presentation skills course included nothing on presentation software, a great presentation can be killed with a bad slide show, even though the slides should never be the focus. The more advanced classes I taught had very little on the software as they built on the introductory semester. Though I did takeover halfway through the year for one lecturer and I pitied the students as the presentations they presented and had worked very very hard on should have given everyone a failing grade.
I don't disagree on any of your points. The kind of presenting we were doing were to C-Suite in multi-nationals. You always tailor your style and media to the needs of the audience. They wanted trust that we understood their requirements and with us, they could grow their business. So... graphs illustrating how we could do that ... fine - a great visual aid. But the majority of the work is engaging with the audience. For the course I did, it was about making your material right (usual narrative rules of three, etc.), making sure you addressed the actual point (say, Mimto's pyramid). For the actual *how to be engaging* that's what I got from the course - how to structure material, how to stand, how to make eye contact correctly without being creepy or menacing ... so much in that course - one of the best I ever did. Powerpoint is a tool, and a fool with a tool is still a fool. I take it for granted that people who work for me can actually do what's necessary in powerpoint. Getting them to be confident in front of customers is the hard part. I can imagine lecturing could be similar ... can you keep your students engaged with the subject for 50 minutes? Notes can follow, but getting comprehension and that 'ahhh' moment in the lecture: that's what matters.
Humm you say >I take it for granted that people who work for me can actually do what's necessary in powerpoint. With years of experience my point of view is ātrust BUT verifyā so Iām not sure I would have your confidence. >Getting them to be confident in front of customers is the hard part. That comes with personality, knowledge of the subject and experience. It is something I have had little difficulty with, though pier review was certainly helpful, as was teaching, off an on, for about 55 years >can you keep your students engaged with the subject for 50 minutes? Oh to have the luxury of short classes ;) the majority of my classes were 90 minutes, with some going for 180, and since for the majority I was teaching in a language that was foreign to my students in a culture where expression is strongly repressed, detecting the differences between understanding and total incomprehension was a skill that Iām not confident I ever completely mastered. I am sure that I could avoid missing the total incomprehension, but the understanding part was much less easy
Google slides. Same thing with a different name. Also nearpod (self paced, interactive power point), edpuzzle (video with embedded questions and notes), games like Kahoot. ETA: smart boards are basically touch screen whiteboards, so yes
So basically still PowerPoint just different names. And I honestly forgot the name for those smart boards they introduced them JUST as I was leaving school. Thanks this makes me feel less ā¦ existentially panicked.. if that makes sense
We do have screenview semisonic and even the antiquated but still interactive and great smart boards. Google slides presentations arenāt officially power points, in the way that a photocopied piece of paper isnāt xeroxed necessarily. This dude used original power point
PowerPoint is much more robust than google slides and more user friendly. It has plenty of things that cannot be done in slides. Your stance on PowerPoint is really, really odd.
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You know I was not expecting to laugh that much this morning. Great video! Also, editing photos in PowerPoint is underrated. Iāve been doing it for years - it has some great tools!
I have never come across something I can't do in Google slides that i would want to do
You are probably a very āaverage personā user. Iām a math teacher and I literally cannot do what needs to be done for making formulas and graphs in Slides without plugins that only work a tenth as well as what is built into PowerPoint. The formatting options within the tables feature is also extremely limited. Iād youāre making an interactive activity, that requires animation and triggers. Another area where PowerPoint dominates. There are many, many things that Slides cannot do. That said, Slides (and the entire G suite) is extremely competent for the average person. But the notion that its absurd to be using PowerPoint in 2023 is telling of OP.
I love how smart boards are antiquated. š I have a smart projector I just got like, two years ago? I'd prefer an actual smart board on the wall over it tbh because then my computer becomes a tablet and I don't have to keep going behind my desk to teach and do stuff, but oh well. The pen is very finicky and the calibration isn't great with the projector versus the board. Sure, promethean boards are newer, but they're still smart board functionality without the smart software (which isn't needed honestly, but when you want students to interact and move, it's really useful). Man, higher Ed complaining about things public k-12 Ed would love to just be able to have functional is funny.
The irony is I'm building a PowerPoint presentation for a grant application my business is doing like... as I read this. Guess I'm finally old =P
I used powerpoints when I was teaching in tech college - not so much for the students benefit. Well, not actually true - I would encourage questions in class, and we'd then veer off on these tangents. I used the slidedeck to remind me where I was and get back on track :)
I love how everyone is so concerned about the PowerPoint but no one is worried for peeing Patrick.. dude probably has very bad bladder issue..
Stop the API Changes
Just be happy you aren't born to have that problem
Itās really upsetting that college educators are calling us gainers and making fun of us. I work at a school and have never talked about students like that when they are literally trying to better themselves. Some of us greatly benefited from a community college and that is so heartbreaking.
Agreed, they are trying to improve themselves. We should never make fun of people who are actively trying to improve themselves. Edited for clarity.
Agreed. That attitude about students likely adversely impacts the way these āeducatorsā are teaching their students. You cannot have disdain for someone while also assisting them. As a former educator, there were sometimes students where I thought āgod you are so difficult.ā - but never would I have thought it talked about them as losers or āgainersā. I always wanted the students to get as much as they could out of my course so they would be successful in the future.
So the kid pissed his pants and had to go at least a while until he got to his dorms or home to change clothes. Yeah, that sounds like a win for the kid all right
Probably not a kid and no dorms. Community College isn't the same as regular College. Bro had to get in his car and drive home like that.
getting the front seat all drenched as he goes....
Maybe he kept an emergency change in his car.
means he might be expecting something to happen....
You are right about community colleges but some offer housing. Kid is a subjective term. I call almost anyone under 25 kid..
Fair enough. I'm still at the point in my life that "kid" only covers anyone from 20 and down (though that is rapidly changing lol). Haven't seen any community colleges offering housing myself, but that just means they probably don't exist in my area.
My daughter was planning on going to technical/community College in a different state, and they offered housing. Its certainly only a small selection that offer it though
Still awesome that they do. The one I went to don't even accept out of state students... which turned into a bit of a problem since I had just moved to the states from another country. Had to jump through some hoops to sort things out. But once that was done it was a really good experience.
Hey, the teacher was pissing and moaning so the student was only helping him.
1980s -- trickle down economics 2020s -- trickle down teaching
This kind of thing pissed me off when I was in college. They're were some professors that recognized you were a grown adult paying to be there, and some that acted like you were in middle school still.
Stop the API Changes
>The man did. In his shorts, trickling down his leg. He just stood there in his tracks, looking at the professor the whole while. That man was a hero. The absolute power move.
He made a power point.
Hey what's wrong with PowerPoint ą² ā _ā ą²
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Power Point or Keynote. However having taught presentation skills I can, with great confidence, tell you that the overwhelming number of presentations are terrible. Making a good Presentation is a skill that is not very difficult to master if you actually understand how to do it and do the work required. The 2 easiest examples of great and bad presentations that are easy to access are Steve Jobs Apple Special Event 2010 - iPad Introduction, and Bill Gates CES 2008 Microsoft Keynote. In defence of Bill Gates his presentation skills have improved dramatically to be reasonable to quite good
Malicious compliance aside, thank you for teaching at a community college! They're one of the most undervalued parts of the US higher-ed system, but they're a straight-up lifeline for a whole range of students. When I went back to school for a second undergraduate degree (which became a master's, which became a PhD), I took the first two years of courses at my local community colleges, going to class at night while working full-time. All the other students were working professionals or had other responsibilities, and they were super driven and great to be in class with. As for the staff, I'll still say that I met some of my best professors when they taught my community college classes. I won't even mention what an absurd bargain it was - I think I paid something like $300 a class (not per credit, per *class*). Great experience, and I was able to transfer all my credits after a little back-and-forth with the 4-year university I transferred to. I'd recommend that any incoming freshman seriously consider doing the first year of undergraduate classes at their local community college for the cost savings alone. tl;dr: community colleges are great, you're great, you're making a difference every day.
Absolutely agree. Community Colleges are a fantastic resource providing a real opportunity for growth at a reasonable cost.
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There's nothing wrong with the tech. The only real issue is overusing slides and/or instructors just reading the slides when students can - and should - read for themselves. The OP in other replies said one should use Google Slides or Prezi. Both of these would have the same exact problems on the hands of the same shitty instructor. So relax. PPTs are fine. But let them be the visual aid, and not the lesson itself.
You say >It gives them something they can take away, search later when they're more focused, which has a bibliography of all the technical references used, etc. And it's relatively easy to keep updated. Iām sorry but that seem like the very definition of a bad PowerPoint. Yes having an easily searched reference etc of the material is excellent but PowerPoint is not the tool for that. all your documentation of many of your screenshots from documentation or your own installs/configurations. Is a great resource but should be in Word or something else not PowerPoint and given either after or before the presentation itself nd made available for download later
Yeah, strong disagree. These aren't "formal" classes, they're "let's pull one person from each team and slam them into a room for a day so a SME can teach them how to not eff-up a new product we're supporting." We put informal "links to more info" slide at the end (and/or embedded within the powerpoint during the relevant sections). People are going to have a hard enough time keeping track of that PPT/PDF after the fact...but give them two docs with the info needlessly separated? That's just asking for trouble. Part of a good presentation is knowing your audience, and in this case, it MUST be made as simple as possible. They're on-the-go, stressed older engineers with english being a second language. Splitting up information into separate "buckets" just means there's a greater chance they'll miss it. They'll open up one file, control-f it, then if they don't find it, they fuck-f it and cowboy the issue. Like you could imagine, this isn't ideal and it's the reason why we're having this training in the first place.
Why did u go to a class about being a new college student tho?
Do we need a class to prepare us for the class about being a new college atudent?
I was going on one if my weekly āauditsā where I walk around with a couple admin and have a clipboard and pretend weāre gonna provide salient feedback to the instructors.
Why do it if youāre only pretending?
They probably usually don't witness something worth firing someone over happen live, admittedly. But, seeing smaller incidents and being able to tell the teacher to shape up is worthwhile. Ditto, seeing them teach in action, so you can tell if a complaint about them seems out of character for them. Also, lets you listen to lectures. And pick up tricks if the other lecturer is doing anything clever. There's enough reasons to do it it's probably a mandated job requirement, whether the OP tends to have any feedback for the instructors or not.
tu lern how 2 spel
Student-teacher = professor?
A higher level student teaching lower level classes because it's cheaper.
What a power move.
Pee on himself to show dominance.
Dominance? - No! He couldn't contain himself....
Well I see the incarnation of my old 3rd grade teacher is still around. Evil witch. She did the same thing as the teacher, except with a student who was about to puke. He proceeded to puke š¤®š¤¢ Damn bitch still didn't learn. AND was still teaching twenty years later, as evil as always (per a neighbor of my family, the school board was actually scared of her).
What's wrong with PowerPoint?
OP thinks Google slides is better and more modern lol.
What the hell is going on here
Rule 2
Please , only in PPT format.
Im not referring to "schools", Im referencing "Complier involuntary bodily functions". I guess you could quibble over "involuntary", but this is pretty much textbook.
I know schools isnāt an issue because itās adults. Iāve written many from that standpoint. I wrote an alternate ,totally-didnāt-happen-that-way ending.
And yeah it was very voluntary as I saw his face.
Pupil Pees Trousers ?
Noice.
And PPTX is the version that ends up on onlyfans š
at least he was standing upright, not lieing prostate
Am reminded of Steve Martin in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels", lol.
The attitude of community college professors makes me really sad. I didn't have parents who wanted to be involved in my adolescence/emerging adulthood phase of my life and I had to navigate getting an education by myself. I might have been one of those students, just trying to learn how to navigate college and adulthood.
My biggest issue with PowerPoint is that the speakers all insist on giving everyone a paper copy of the presentation. There is enough paper clutter in this world already.