Group 2: Gregory Alexander Gordon, Omar Walid Harb, Gregory J Hengel, Imran Shaffiq Kotadia, Gabriel Lai

Group Information


Group Number 02 Team Name OGGGI  Contributors
 * Omar Walid Harb
 * Gregory Alexander Gordon
 * Gregory J Hengel
 * Gabriel Lai
 * Imran Shaffiq Kotadia

lecture: Cpsc 203 Winter09 L01 Dr. Kawash Tutorial  T18 Maha Shouman



Introduction
A slideshow is a display of a series of chosen images and text, which is done for artistic or instructional purposes. Slideshows have become one of the most popular tools of choice for giving presentations. There are many advantages using Slideshows because people love visuals. Visuals helps people put an image to the idea. If you are standing in front of an audience describing your innovative thoughts, showing a picture or photo with highlighted points helps get your ideas across and your listeners are likely to sit up and take notice because slideshow is a good choice in giving presentation it is used in almost every high level class room today. They provide visual learning aids to accompany the traditional lecture format, which allows students to actually see what they are learning about. But are these presentations as effective as they claim to be? Through secondary research our team plans to uncover positive as well as negative aspects of slide shows, and if necessary, find ways to improve the efficiency of presentations.

Who uses slideshows?
In today’s world many people uses slideshows this includes students, teachers, professors, business men, just to name a few. Slideshows are used by many different people for many different reasons. For example Students uses it for projects, teacher and professors uses it to aid their lecture, business men uses it for board meetings, awareness group uses it to get their point across. These are just the few examples of people whouse slideshow presentation.

Advantages
The advantages of slideshow presentations are many. First, they are an efficient use of time. The time it takes to make a solid slideshow is insignificant compared to the time it takes to make other presentation aids like posters or overheads or anything else. This saves the presenter precious preparation time so they can focus more energy on the verbal portion of their presentation, which is the most important. Additionally, once the presentation is finished, there is nothing to throw away and create waste from.

Powerpoint slideshows are especially useful as platforms for other media, such as pictures, sound bites, and video clips. Instead of having to make these yourself, just go online to get them. Internet resources like Google and Youtube have been great goons to presenters, allowing them easy access to maps, speeches, videos and pictures that they can have on their slides to further enhance the participation and education of their audience. Slideshows also provide structure to presentations. By being able to break down a presentation into manageable chunks, the audience can absorb the information better. It is better to have a slideshow of many slides with little information on each, then to have a show of few slides crowded with text, pictures and animations. Additionally, the presenter can navigate through a slideshow, going forward or backward between slides if need be to keep the pace with how the audience is progressing through the presentation.

Slideshows also make the option available to print off the slides and have them available to the audience. This is a double-edges sword in that it can both benefit and threaten the education of the audience. Having the whole presentation in front of the audience on paper, allows them to spend more of their time and energy actually understanding what is being presented instead of madly trying to write down what the presenter is saying. The notes the audience will write will have more to do with actually processing and interpreting the information, instead of just copying it, which is tremendously beneficial when referring back to them for later study. However this is dangerous in that since the notes all already there some of the audience will just not write anything. But they might not have written anything anyway. So having the slides on paper would still benefit them.

Lastly slideshows can be used for more than just one room presentations. Slideshows are duplicateable and a great way to communicate ideas to the world. Numerous online communities such as Slideshare and Sliderocketexist to develop communities of people to view the shows people submit. There are slideshows explaining finances, businesses, religions and ideas to the global community that are not vulnerable to the ‘broken telephone’ method of person to person communications, each person viewing a slideshow gets the same message time and time again.

Disadvantages
With advantages, there are also disadvantages to slideshow presentations. For one, the dim lighted atmosphere may cause the audience to feel fatigued, and therefore lose concentration on the presentation. Another disadvantage is that it encourages audiences to think in bullets. Studies show that narratives, rather than outlines, are the best way to remember and process information. Slide shows may also promote laziness. It may cause the audience to simply read the slides, rather than jot down notes, which may jeopardize their ability to learn the content. Slides can also be distracting. If there is too much happening on a slide, audiences may be drawn more to that slide than what the presenter is saying. Finally, slide shows are inadaptable. If for some reason the presenter feels like the audience isn’t grasping the concept they are trying to portray, it is difficult if not impossible to change their presentation to fit the audiences learning styles. <BR>

For an example of how these disadvantages have come into play, I would quickly like to go over a study performed by a lady name Nicole Amare. The study’s purpose was to test the results of a slideshow oriented class, versus a lecture orientated class. There were 84 students broken into 4 groups, two groups would be taught using power point and the other two were taught using lecture only. All four groups were in the same course, had the same instructor, as well as the same quizzes and tests. At the beginning of the course all four classes were given a simplified pre-test to test the students original knowledge of the subject, which was followed by a post test after the course which tested the students on all of the material covered throughout the semester. Out of the 84 students, 79% said they preferred power point over lecture and 62% claimed that they gained more from power point than lecture. Table 1 shows the test results for the pre and post tests. The averages aren’t necessarily important, however the increase in the average score is interesting. According to these results, lecture seems to be the more effective teaching tool, which is surprising considering well over half the class preferred power point over lecture. So to bring us to our next question, how can one use a power point to their advantage?

How to Make An Effective Slide Show
The first thing that you want to remember when you’re making a slide show is that the slides you are making only serve the purpose of reinforcing the presenter’s ideas. The presenter has to be aware that his or her purpose is to represent the topic being presented and that they should not be replaced by a PowerPoint. One of the keys to having an effective slide show is by having slides that are short, to the point. Short sentences in a presentation mean that the audience doesn’t have to read a paragraph of what may or may not be entirely useful information. As a presenter you also want to organize the thoughts and key points that you are trying to get across. If you had to read a paragraph of information and listen to someone talk at the same time would you be able to do both? Chances are, you would do one or the other which means you’re missing out on information from the other. Short and relevant slides help the audience to do both and get the most from a presentation. A slide should look good without getting so fancy that the audience is too busy admiring the presentation rather than actually reading it. So how do you make a slide presentable? Things to keep in mind are that colors are not actually always a good thing. Having different sentences different colors can be flashy but certain colors can be hard to read for different people. Also, a lot of slides give the presenter the option of having different colors in the background. Your audience should not have to strain to get information from your slides. Having key words a different color can actually aid in getting a message across but you have to keep in mind the points previously mentioned. PowerPoint also gives people the option of adding a variety of different animations and sounds. Although these can be fun and attention grabbing this isn’t always a good thing. In moderation animations and sounds can be effective for catching or keeping the attention of the audience, but in excess the presentation becomes distracting and unprofessional.<BR>

Conclusion
Slideshows can be used effectively in order to increase absorption of materials being presented. However, in the Amare study, even though the students enjoyed and liked slideshows more, the test scores stated otherwise. With that being said, you must always tailor to the people you are presenting to. All in all, slideshows are not meant to replace presentations and act as a supplement. They are meant to support presentations and serve as a reference to the presenter and the audience in order to enhance a presentation. The OGGGI group would like to thank you for reading our wiki page. We hope that our page on slideshows was informative and helpful.