Power Point Tips for the Medical Educator

I promise I will write a real entry on the classes we have in block 2, but for right now I just want to make a comment on Power Point slides.

Most of our lectures range from 30 to 55 slides per hour long lecture and the doctors do a pretty good job of keeping the amount of information on each slide reasonable. We've had a couple insanely complicated graphs but they have been relatively isolated incidences.

If, as an instructor, you have a topic that you are planning to discuss for more than half an hour maybe try breaking it down into more than one slide. That way your text won't be teeny tiny and your students will have more room on their slide print outs to make notes (instead of having to use a second copy because they run out of room on the first one...).

I normally print two to four slides to a page, but should have printed singles for this one.

When I had to take a class in public speaking they taught us that you should try to limit yourself to no more than six lines of text per slide. That sounds reasonable and it is even better if you toss in a picture or an animation every now and then... Not to say that I didn't learn a lot but that one slide was turned into a four page outline! Four pages! That seems like a lot, right? I thought so anyway. At least it is a good instructor otherwise it could have been a lot worse!