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Simonne Nouer, MD, PhD
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Most of the courses I teach are online and asynchronous. For those courses, all lectures are pre-recorded and accessible to students via Blackboard, UTHSC Learning Management System. For me, PowerPoint is a great way to communicate the structure of the lecture. It serves as a guide to me, almost like a lecture prompt, as I am presenting the content. It also serves as a guide to students as we move along the content. It is an excellent way to present graphs, figures and tables as a visual aid to better cover the class content and enhance student’s understanding of the class material. In my teaching, I often use the notes section to script my lectures, which can also serve as a resource for providing lecture notes to students. These notes help me remember important information that I want to make sure is covered during the presentation. While I personally use a different software for recording my lectures, PowerPoint offers a valuable feature for recording presentations directly within the application. The feature is user-friendly and If updates are needed, it is easy to make slide specific edits with no need to re-record the entire presentation. Additionally, you can incorporate a video of yourself during the presentation or at the start of the presentation, which I prefer. A recent introduced feature called ‘Teleprompter View’ enables you to view your notes without having to look away from the camera; the notes appear at the top of the screen. Once recorded, and you are satisfied with the product, the final video can be uploaded to a media server and linked to course content in Blackboard or any other learning management system. Creating handouts is another feature that I often use as they can serve as a means for students to write down notes throughout the lecture. Creating a PDF handout file and making it available with the recorded lecture enable tech-savvy multiple device users to write down notes on a tablet while watching the recorded lecture on their computer. Regarding animations, I seldom use them, except when they help me emphasize content, or allow students time to contemplate a question before revealing the answer. To avoid displaying answers on handouts alongside questions, consider creating two slides: one with the question and the subsequent slide showing both the question and answer. When using animations, I try to keep it simple to avoid unwanted distractions. Another feature I frequently use is the ‘Hide Slide’, this option enables me to have additional content in one only PowerPoint presentation that I can show or hide depending on the audience and how deep I want to dive in the content. Whether for online or in-person lectures, PowerPoint remains a handy choice.
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