Power Points of PowerPoint … available in Google Drive by Thanos Hatziapostolou

PowerPoint: an ubiquitous tool in education for presenting material to students! PowerPoint as a tool will not improve student learning. However, it can be a highly effective tool to engage students in the learning process during a class session. It’s actually the way that teachers use PowerPoint that can magnetize student attention.

All of us are very experienced and know how to create effective PowerPoint presentations. We know that we should keep it simple, that we must not overload slides with text and limit (and even avoid) bullet points. We know that we should have a visual theme, to include high quality graphics and charts, use animation properly etc.

Actually, the trend is to use as many graphics as possible and as less text as possible. In addition, a presentation should include aspects from infographics. “Infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly. They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends.”

Especially for educational purposes, appropriate use of graphics and animations within a PowerPoint presentation has a lot of potential benefits. Among others they:

• help students remember the content;
• enable students to understand connections between concepts;
• improve students’ focus;
• increase spontaneity and interactivity (and thus increase wonder);
• aid in explaining complex material and emphasizing key points.

So, a contemporary PowerPoint presentation looks like this or this. Nonetheless, it is true that designing graphics and animations in PowerPoint is a very time consuming process!

The purpose of this blog post is to inform you that I have shared with you a Google Drive directory with numerous PowerPoint presentations that include ready-to-use GRAPHICS and ANIMATIONS. I collected them from the web and most of them are under the Creative Commons License. You will find charts, pyramids, gauges, diagrams, calendars, timers, infographic components, animations and so many others. Please note that to see some of them (especially the animations) PowerPoint needs to be in Slide Show mode.

A last comment: just because you can doesn’t mean you should … at least not all the time. Adding graphics and animation to a presentation can have a great impact if used effectively. Overuse can be distracting over the course of a lecture.

I hope that you will find the material useful and that you will create a captivating presentation file for your next lecture or your next conference.

Thanos Hatziapostolou
Senior Lecturer, Computer Science Department