DigitaLang
Teaching Languages with Web 2.0 Technology
The 10/20/30 PowerPoint Rule.
Sep 1st
If you haven’t heard about it, Guy Kawasaki coined a clever little expression a while back to help folk improve their PowerPoint presentations. He called it the 10, 20, 30 rule.
Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/
- 10 – No more than ten slides in your presentation. This key number is supposed to help focus your audiences minds on your message, rather than your slides.
- 20 – If you have a one hour meeting, aim to finish your slides in no more than 20 minutes. What with technical problems, questions and chatting, you’ll end up running out of time and going too fast at the end if you try to cram in too much.
- 30 – No font size smaller than 30. If you want your audience to be able to read your slides (you do!) then make sure your text is legible. If you find yourself trying to use a smaller font to squeeze it all in, ask yourself:
- do you need all that text anyway?
- shouldn’t the main message come from you, not your slides?
- wouldn’t it be better to spread the information over more than one slide?
What made me decide to point all this out here though is because I found a nice little presentation on SlideShare today by Cory O’Brien that explains all of this in a nice, visual way. Have a look:
Guy even goes as far as giving us a suggested theme of what should go on each slide. Although I think this is far more relevant to marketers and business-people, I think it’s worth bearing in mind for education, too (and of course it works excellently for a business English teacher.) You can see Guy’s suggestions on Cory’s slide number 3 above. Better still, why not listen to it from the horses mouth Guy himself:
So, there we have it. If I haven’t convinced you, I hope Guy has!
Got a great PowerPoint tip? Is there a mnemonic-like “rule” you tell yourelf before starting to plan a presentation? Be sure to tell us about it in the comments section below! 
All the best and happy presenting!
Seth.
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 3 – Get Your Blog Moving!
Jul 27th
In this final part of my short series on how to blog with EFL students. If you missed the first two you can find them here:
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 1 – Setting Up a Blog
and here:
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 2 – Blogs Grow With Comments
In this final set of slides I’ll discuss a couple of the essential things every blogger should be able to do to whether they be a teacher or a student. This is certainly not an exhaustive list of everything a blogger should do, but it should help you get the final basics in place.
Uploading a photo to your blog post makes it far easier on the eye and therefore more likely to be read. Adding a link to other related posts or interesting information helps give your reader a bit of background and adds context to your post and finally sorting out your profile lets your reader find out a bit more about you which, hopefully, will make them more likely to want to connect with you.
So, on to the slides: Once again, please do ask if there is anything you’re unclear about or if you want a bit of help with something. If you think I’ve missed out another vital skill for bloggers, do tell me. I’d love to know and will happily update the slides in the future. Down there at the bottom in the comments section, let it rip! 
Take care and all the best,
Seth.
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 2 – Blogs Grow With Comments
Jul 20th
As I mentioned in the first post in this series blogging offers a lot of scope for authentic communication from EFL students. From “guest speakers” to reflective jornals, to simple discussions, to stronger “opinion pieces” there are all sorts of ways EFL teachers can use blogs with their learners.
For example this year at the high-school I work at, we’ve been discussing social issues that we feel strongly about in our personal blogs. We’ve also used a class blog to share hints and advice for classmates about how they can improve their own blogs.
Although the slides in this series are all quite specific to my own students (and trainee teachers,) I hope they can be helpful to other teachers and teacher-trainers, too. I’ve learnt a lot from what other people have generously shared over the internet and I hope now to be able to “put a bit back” for others.
In this second set of slides we discuss how important comments are to a blog (and a blogger) and how to enable them. The slides use screenshots from Blogger itself. On occasion things have changed in Blogger slightly from when I originally wrote this guide, but the basics have remained more or less the same.
If you want any more information about edublogging, or if you’d like to share a lesson idea that you’ve tried out with your students, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.
All the very best!
Seth.
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 1 – Setting Up a Blog
Jul 17th
Blogging is a great way to allow your EFL students a little space to be creative, talk to a “real” audience and connect with other learners.
This year at the high-school I work at, Martino Martini, in Mezzolombardo, Italy, we’ve been experimenting with using student blogs as a kind of reflective journal to discuss things we’ve learnt in class. We’ve also started a class blog as a digital noticeboard for pasting slides I’ve used in class, homework reminders and examples of great work from within the class.
Although they are quite specific to the needs of my students (and trainee teachers,) I’ve decided to share the slides I use to teach blogging.I hope they can be helpful to other teachers and teacher-trainers, too.
So, this will be the first in a series of three presentations to help EFL students and teachers learn how to blog and how to use Blogger. In these slides I go through the basics of what blogging is all about and show how to set up a Blogger account, using screenshots from Blogger itself.
I hope these slides will help you and your students get started with this great communicative tool! If you have any questions, or have any advice of your own about setting up a blog to use with students, be sure to leave a comment to tell us about it
p.s. I know, I know what you’re thinking. This presentation breaks many, if not all the “rules” I shared in my Death By PowerPoint – and How to Avoid It post I wrote recently. My only defence is that I wrote this guide about 18 months ago, before I’d spent time studying how to improve presentations. Tell you what, I’ll make a promise. If I get round to updating these slides, I promise to upload the improved version here, okay?!
All the best,
Seth.
Death By PowerPoint (and how to avoid it!)
Jun 30th
I’m sure at some point in your career you have been bored to tears by a PowerPoint presentation. Let’s face it, who hasn’t! The same, I’m sure, is true for our students.
This is the presentation I gave at the IATEFL BESIG Rome mini-summer-conference in June 2010 to help teachers improve their PowerPoint presentations.
I was really pleased with the feedback I got from the presentation. It seemed to strike a chord with many of the teachers, school owners, writers and others who were present. (The poor folk had probably suffered too many terrible presentations in their careers!)
I hope these slides can help both people wishing to improve their own powerPoint presentations, teachers looking for a few ideas of ways to use PowerPoint with their classes and teachers who would like to do a lesson for their students about the basics of good slide design.
As always with “good” presentation slides, they only really work properly if they have a presenter there to explain what on earth they are talking about! I hope anyhow that you will find this useful. The presentation is split into two basic parts, an introduction which includes a lesson plan, and the second section (around slide number 50) which actually discusses the “Dos and Don’ts” when creating a PowerPoint presentation.
Have you got any extra hints and tips to share about how to create high-quality PowerPoint slides? Have you ever seen a truly awful presentation that you want to purge from your memory? Please leave us a comment to tell us about it. We’d love to hear from you!
All the best,
Seth.
Walking on Clouds
Jun 27th
Well, I got back early yesterday evening from the IATEFL BESIG Rome summer mini-conference and I still feel like I’m walking on clouds (hence the title!)
I gave a seminar, “Death by PowerPoint – and How to Avoid It,” which seemed to go really well. I got some great feedback from the folk that came to the presentation, which really left me feeling happy. I was especially happy seeing as the audience were such experienced and knowledgeable professionals.
Image by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/estarsid/
The conference was really well organised, the IATEFL BESIG members and the staff from The Byron School, Rome pulled out all the stops to make sure things went smoothly. There was a lovely welcoming atmosphere and the seminars and presentations all seemed to go smoothly. If I had one minor criticism, it would be that the balance of commercial presentations “selling” a product to non-commercial seminars “training” the conference attendees was perhaps a little too heavily in favour of the commercial conference sponsors. It was however the first time this event has been held, so let’s see if we can balance it out next time. Overall, the conference was a really positive experience and I’ll give a seminar again if I’m invited back!
So what next? In the next 2 days I want to get my presentation up and on-line here on my blog as I promised all the lovely folk who came to watch it. I’ll try to get both the slides up here, as well as the video that Valentina Dodge kindly shot for me. I must admit I cringed to watch myself in it last night, but ah-well, so be it!
If you were at the seminar, I’d love to connect with you in the future. If use Twitter, (or even if you don’t, yet!) you can catch up with the various educational technology links, hints and tips I share here: Twitter.com/SethDickens. You can also follow this blog (as I mentioned in the seminar) via RSS by clicking here and signing up to my RSS feed. Finally, if you’re a bit more traditional, have a look up there in the top right hand corner and you can sign up to receive news of new blog posts via your email box.
What were your impressions of the conference. What went well for you and what would you like to see done differently next time. Let’s strike up a chat in the comments section here.
Best,
Seth.
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