Week 1 Journal

Questions for the Week 1: 

Which cause(s) of Death by PowerPoint does your PowerPoint often have? Which Multimedia Learning Principle(s) do you often violate? What would be your biggest challenge(s) overcoming those habits or shortcomings?  

I gave a presentation last session and my biggest error was text overdose (DBPP #2).  I had no pictures to illustrate my points and I had lots of bullets on each slide.  I was trying to include all information for each point on each slide.  Next time I would break it into more slides.  I had a few examples to explain my points on the slide, but frequently I was just reading the slides (MLP #3).  Giving more information in my narration than in the slide is a difficult task for me.  I use the slides as my cues for what I am talking about.  The slides where I included notes at the bottom and then printed the slides with notes made it easier for me to give a better presentation.

I am actually torn on the MLP #3 of Redundancy Principle.  I want to provide my slides to the audience as notes for them to take home and allow them to only add to it what would help them understand what I was saying.  If I don't include my whole point then they could potentially be spending so much time trying to write notes that they would miss some of what I said.  I want to work on a good balance of enough information on my slide that my students could remember what my point was without overdosing the screen in text for them to read.