This is the third article in my series about improving PowerPoint presentations. As with many ed tech tools and pedagogical approaches, PowerPoint undeservedly catches a lot of flak, with people calling it “unimaginative,” “boring,” and “lazy.” What people often don’t realize is that the tool itself is amazing; it is the way people use it that is poor; they fail to engage when they don’t have sound knowledge of how to (or even if they should) place elements and in what quality and form. Personally, I can never get tired of talking about PowerPoint because it is a tool that I love, despite all the hate it gets.
So…let’s get back into it. I’ve previously talked a lot about text in PowerPoint, and now I want to focus on images.
Making images larger
The thing is…images are king. PowerPoint presenters don’t leverage them enough. People are very visual and nothing reels them in like a powerful image. So…even if you are already a person who includes images near text to convey your learning content, consider making the images bigger in relation to the text, especially if you are presenting your PowerPoint and it is not simply being posted to Blackboard or another LMS for learners to view and read.
Presenters and teachers are conditioned to believe that the words are the most important element on PowerPoint slides because…well, that’s the information. There’s some validity to that, but it is still the case that in terms of engagement, viewers are drawn into a powerful image and may listen to your words more attentively since you’ve caught their attention. The image being “powerful” has to do with the image itself, but also to do simply with how big you make it on the slide.
Look at the difference between these two slides and consider how one might be more captivating than the other. It’s a subtle effect, but…don’t be afraid to size up your images for greater engagement.
Of course, size decisions still depend on what you want for a given slide. There may be some slides where you want students to notice the text more than the image, at least initially (presumably you want them to notice both). In those cases, by all means make the text bigger. The point is, be intentional with where you want attention drawn, and size elements accordingly rather than rotely make everything the same size.
Avoid multiple images
Another image mistake to avoid is having too many photos on a single slide. The temptation to put four photos on one slide may be there sometimes, as you’ll feel “thorough” having many photos reinforcing your content. Two or three photos may be an acceptable max; when you get into four or five, you may be dividing the viewer’s attention too much, to the point that they are too distracted by various photos to listen to you (the speaker) or to even be able to focus on any one photo. A quality image or two should be good enough.
Maintain diversity in photos
When including images of people in your PowerPoints, be mindful of including people from many different backgrounds, in terms of race, ethnicity, disability status, body size, height, age, hair color, etc. It can be easy to inadvertently include only a narrow “type” of people in images, especially if one is drawing from free stock photos on the Internet, which for a while now have skewed toward very mainstream. Though this is changing and you will see stock photos that reflect more diversity, you may still end up having to be intentional about which photos you pick. The reality is that college students come in all body sizes, hair colors, ages, backgrounds, etc, Some are in wheelchairs, some are 40 rather than 18 or 20, some have hair with green highlights, some have tattoos. They are all students who should be represented even in learning content such as images in PowerPoints.
For more on images in PowerPoints, here is an excellent tip sheet:
A Guide to Using Images and Photos for PowerPoint.
