PowerPoint and Other Presentations for Learning

I am currently reading Multi-Media Learning by Richard Mayer. This book is an excellent resource to assist with designing presentations that enhance student learning. Many of the points discussed reinforce what we know about quality teaching in terms of chunking information and providing cues to signal importance of specific information. The simplest message I take from this research is to design your classroom presentations with powerful images and limited text, but use narration to tell the story or concept. Keep the bullet points in the notes.


Debra Pickering has a presentation that provides a background lesson on the war in Afghanistan. It is an excellent example of how to use PowerPoint for teaching. If you get an opportunity to see her presentation on this, I highly recommend it.

This article provides the "Cliff Notes" version of Multi-Media Learning. Cliff Atkinson, who co-authored the article with Richard Mayer, looks at multi-media presentation from a business perspective. His business perspective can easily be translated to classroom teaching. We have limited time to present to our students and we want our limited time to have a lasting impact. Atkinson discusses the Hollywood research that has been effectively using multi-media to communicate without using bullet points. Additionally, he reiterates the need for business presenters to run through a presentation with colleagues to perfect their presentation. As educators we are great at sharing our presentation, but do we spend time together critiquing our presentation to make them better?

Let me know your thoughts.