The Power of Point

One of the most widely used technologies is the computer slide show, which Microsoft has bequeathed to the worlds of commerce and education as PowerPoint, an application that has become the lingua franca of conferences and symposia.

It is important that we at least understand how this technology interfaces with the work we have been doing, so that we can begin to see how technology begins to unify process through activities that cut across media. PowerPoint is a multimedia tool, although most users at conferences used mostly the power of text as persuasion, many do include images, animation, and in some cases sound, although the most usual sound is the presenter who narrates the content of the presentation while the slide provides a means of focusing the attention of the audience.

PowerPoint uses the concept of creating slides. The major point is that slides force us to be economical in our expressions (don't put too much on a slide), and slides give us the freedom to experiment with sequences, since these individual modules of information can be moved around, changing the order of presentation, much in the way that a story board is done for films and plays.

In general, you are creating a slide show for a live presentation that will use a projector with a laptop computer. At most conferences, presenters come with their own laptops and connect to the computer projector through their VGA jack. This provides a certain level of security because of the familarity of the computer and its operating system.

As in any technology media application, you are concerned with creating content. Your major content will be the summary phrases on your slides. But you can add to the presentation by finding images that enhance the text. Thus you might do an image search that conforms to your topic and develop image resources that you can draw upon as you create your slides. Sometimes the images alone might be the entire slide, and you might create images of tables and graphs that you will include in presentation.

If you are using music or video, you should be aware that you can embed these media in your slide show and have them play, or you can link to them. PowerPoint is also valuable for hyperlinks if the computer is connected to the Internet, so that you can include links that take you to locations outside of the slideshow. Be cautious with such possibilities because they can also create technical difficulties and get in the way of your presentation.

Perhaps the strongest feature of PowerPoint is that it has many similarities to Word. In addition, it also capitalizes on the procedures embedded in the operating system. This allows the user to proceed somewhat intuitively in putting together a slide show and to develop additional skills through exploring and probing the various menus. A number of excellent tutorials can be discovered through web searches.