Bret Devereaux

Looking over my student feedback for this last semester, one thing I find a touch odd are student requests for more text-oriented powerpoints (e..g powerpoints 'with notes'). Which I find odd because this is exactly what I was taught *not* to put on a teaching powerpoint.

So when I zoom-lecture, my first slide in every lecture's powerpoint is an outline of the lecture (in bullet points), along with a list of key terms, ideas, people and dates. I encourage students that they should get in the habit of writing that all in their notes first.

That is a stop-gap for my preference in a physical classroom, which is to write that outline on the board before class begins so that it can be there while the PPT is on the screen with images, quotes, etc. Zoom doesn't really allow for that, unfortunately.

The idea here is to prime the students with a conceptual outline (which I talk through at the opening of every lecture, "today we're going to talk about..." style; it's not just up there, I talk it) so they can follow where we are and where we are going.

But the slides I use for the powerpoints themselves are almost all images or diagrams. If there is text, it is a quotation from a primary source which I think is important and worth analyzing.

Perhaps this is me getting old but that was how all of the best lecturers I studied under used visual aids. Those best teachers never put the 'notes' on the powerpoint - the notes were the lecture. You stress key points by repeating them, by drawing attention to them.

(And I am willing to be powerfully silly to draw attention to key points. I will repeat them slowly, I will literally pound the table, pump my first, jump up and down, whatever. I regularly have the class chant key points back to me. I am not afraid to look silly.)