Snoozing and Losing, Chapter 1

Do you remember when you were first introduced to the concept of a PowerPoint? It revolutionized my college classes! You no longer had to listen and take notes, you could simply read the screen. The other option would be to listen to the professor as he or she read off of the screen.

All joking aside, PowerPoint presentations have provided a great tool for excellent presenters. There's a reason that "thirty million PowerPoints are given around the world every day" (Burmark, 4). They allow presenters to show images of the content and prevents leaving out key concepts. I have been held in rapt attention by an amazing presenter aided by his PowerPoint presentation. However, for every one fantastic presenter I've seen five tortuous presentations. This is why I'm so excited to discuss Dr. Lynell Burmark's book They Snooze, You Loose: An Educator's Guide to Successful Presentations. This book breaks down the principals of an excellent PowerPoint presentation and provides simple strategies to improve your PowerPoint.

In Chapter 1- Tweaking presentations, Dr. Burmark provides some simple tips on how to improve already existing presentations. Her message was not to throw away all of the work that you've put into a presentation, but to target the areas that need the most improvement. Some key points were:

1. Allow yourself to be creative. Use the page to truly showcase your content.
2. Make sure your background is just background. It shouldn't be the highlight of your presentation.
3. Visuals used to attract the eye need to start on the left in countries that read left to right.
   
4. Clump important information.
5. Color is key! Colors attract attention and evoke emotion.
6. Font is key! The font needs to match the genre of presentation and be easy to read from a distance.
7. Avoid being verbose. A slide needs to be effective in three seconds.

Creating the perfect background for your slides is difficult. As a presenter, you want to grab your audience's attention, but you also need to focus on the message of your presentation. As the author states, it would be ridiculous to use a tropical background for a presentation on arctic winters. I have been guilty of choosing loud, over-stated backgrounds simply because I found them appealing.

I found the sections regarding font and color most helpful. People intuitively know what colors attract them, but one person's calming sea green is my grandma's old, awful kitchen from the seventies. Understanding color and how it effects people is one of the most key components of a presentation. The safest color scheme in a presentation is a blue background with yellow foreground/text. Yellow is the most eye catching of all colors. This color combination will not exclude people with red-green color blindness. Green, like this blog, is known to inspire calm feelings and thoughts of nature. (Burmark, 8-10) Green may be a great color scheme when delivering negative news to a large crowd!

I often assign presentations to my students. For the past two years, I have struggled to read entire text blocks in the Chiller font, the Blackadder font, and the Mistral font. I understand the attraction to these fonts, and I've even used them for headings. It is impossible to read more than a few words written in these fonts. Dr. Burmark recommended the following fonts for presentations: Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, or Arial.

Perhaps the most difficult principal to follow is the word limitation. It's difficult to reduce thoughts to just the most salient points. I am guilty of this crime. In several presentations, I have blocks of just text. It seems important to use my entire vocabulary, but it could be reduced to just a few key words. A slide should provide its key elements in three seconds--- much like a billboard advertisement. (Burmark, 14).

Almost every industry uses PowerPoints to convey information to an audience. In education, the information being share is most often key topics for content mastery. If educators fail to create stimulating presentations, students will ultimately fail in content mastery. I will be utilizing many of these principals to ensure that my students are not "snoozing" and therefore I'm not "losing."

Works Cited:
Burmark, L. (2011). They snooze, you lose. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.