How many of you out there use PowerPoint presentations in your classrooms? Let me see by a show of hands....that many, eh? That is outstanding! PowerPoint is a valuable tool, and an excellent way to bring information to your students in a multimedia format.

However, I wonder how many of you plan PowerPoints with more than a visual approach? What I mean by that is that primary visual learners get a great deal out of PowerPoints. They can take notes projected on the screen or board and get a lot out of it. On the other hand your auditory and kinesthetic learners cannot. Some of them actually cannot take the notes. Something does not translate for them. They look at the screen or the board, and then when they look down at their papers to write down the notes...nothing. They information has fled!

So what does that mean? Are PowerPoints not effective as a teaching tool, excepting to your primary visual learners?

The answer is they don't have to be! I started doing this year preparing my PowerPoint slides with narration. When you are looking through a PowerPoint prior to showing it you can add your voice with a simple headset mike. By reading the slide narration onto each slide you incorporate more learning styles, and increase the impact and effectiveness of your PowerPoint dramatically.

When you are looking through the slides, with a headset, or mike plugged in, select Insert on the menu bar. Down near the bottom of the pop out menu this produces the choice you want is Movies and Sounds. Click on that and then click on Record Sounds.

Speak clearly into the mike, clearly enunciate each word. My students like it best when I use my Game Show Guy voice. I also throw in a lot of weird noises. They love that and you will find it gets them to pay closer attention.

You can further distinguish your PowerPoints for notetaking by changing font colors, but don't overdo it. I keep most of the words on my slides in white colored font. When something comes up that I want them to take as a note I highlight that in yellow. This clearly denotes when they need to take a note and when they do not.

To further refine this, I recently started to use specific note slides. Rather than sprinkling notes throughout the presentation I concentrate the notes on one slide after each set of slides that presents related ideas. We go through three or four slides with words in white, they read them as my voice reads them, and I walk around the room to make sure they are staying focused and taking notes. I should mention that I use an InterWrite pad to do this.

After a few slides a note slide pops up. It says Topic in the title, and there are one to three bulleted notes that they need to take down. This slide also has recorded narration, and I usually play this one twice or as many times as they ask for it.

An additional advantage is that I can be sure that every class gets the same set of notes. How many times have you realized after a class left that you forgot to mention something important to that one class? Sometimes it is only one thing, but danged if it isn't usually something I meant to put on the test!

By doing the presentation this way I am insuring that my auditory learners, and my kinesthetic learners have a greater chance to get more from the presentation than they would have had a chance to gain otherwise.

Another cool side effect, I discovered by accident was that when I got laryngitis one day I was able to continue teaching, and we did not lose any time. My voice still gave the notes, even though I could not talk.