Teaching is an art. While teaching young and impressionable minds, a teacher always has to ensure that she is not just providing consistent information on a topic but is also making the curriculum enjoyable.
Bombarding the students just with information is the last thing that a teacher wants.
Although manual teaching has been taken over by digital presentations in most schools, the intrinsic essence of education remains the same. A teacher has to be interesting and relevant at the same time.
So, how do you pull that off in a digital presentation, where you are necessarily dependent on slides to convey all the information in an exciting way?
If you are a teacher seeking to make your presentations to the students more enriching and interesting at the same time, this article is for you. Here’s a lowdown of six simple presentation tips that will help you engage with your student better than ever before.
1. Use As Many Slides As You Require
One of the worst myths about presentations is that one has to use as fewer slides as possible to make a classroom session enjoyable. The number of slides required to teach your students is an absolutely irrelevant metric.
As already known, the attention span of children in this digital age is really low. So, instead of having one slide cover five minutes of your lecture, you can have five slides. This will not only retain the attention of your students but also make the curriculum more engaging.
In your search for a useful slideshow tool, you might be wondering: what is the best free slideshow maker that will enable you to create more engaging presentations for your students?
In Video, an online video editor, is one of the most reliable and creative platforms to create engaging video presentations for not only meetings but also for classroom teaching.
2. Prioritize And Teach What’s Necessary
Verbal teaching often sees teachers digress from a particular topic and yet keep everything relevant and engaging. However, in the case of digital presentations, too much digression from the main topic may become tedious and boring.
Such circumstances require a teacher to be able to prioritize and select only the portions that are essentially able to engage the students while imparting the right information at the same time.
For example, too much data or graphs on the presentation slides may simply deplete the attention span of a student. Hence, it is always recommended not to crowd the presentations with data and graphs. If the need for some additional information is required, you could always verbally talk about the same.
Punctuating slideshows with verbal teachings and digression is always a great idea to garner more engagement from students and make the classes extremely enjoyable.
3. Engage Your Students With Voiceovers
Digital teaching is still in a nascent stage with a massive scope for improvisation and experimentation.
If your school allows, you can try out different things to make lessons interesting for students, especially those who are remotely studying with regards to the pandemic breakout. A novel idea that allows teachers to make lessons interesting is by adding voiceovers.
This especially makes great sense if your students are studying from remote locations and have issues with hearing your direct voice alongside the slides. Adding voiceovers to the slides in such cases will ensure that there is no lag whatsoever while teaching the lessons.
Adding voiceovers to slideshows is especially a great idea because you are in a position to add voices of other personalities as well to make the presentation catchy.
For example, if you are teaching poetry, you could add a recitation by the poet to the slide – imagine how wonderful an experience it will be. In Video’s smart mp3 youtube converter allows you to attach audio directly to the slides or video with ease without spending a penny.
The online video editor is also beginner-friendly and has a bank of tutorials to learn from in case you have no prior knowledge of editing slideshows and inserting audio.
4. Keep The Slides Clean And Simple
Often many teachers tend to add a lot of noise to the slides in the form of banners, footers, page numbers, headers, and so on. Although such redundant information does not add anything extra, it caters a lot towards distracting the students.
Hence, when creating slideshows, try to ensure that they are neat and tidy – rightly packed with information and never too crowded.
Even in the case of graphs and statistics, try not to add too many on a single slide. Keeping too much vital information on a single slide also tends to make the lectures pretty boring, thus literally imploring the students to lose their attention.
5. Maximize Visual Content In Your Slides
It is regarded that human beings are able to retain visual memories much longer than verbal memories. As a teacher working with digital presentations, you are in a space to capitalize on this power and make your lessons noteworthy and interesting.
When preparing presentations, make sure to add a lot of visuals that help to illustrate your topics further. In fact, keeping fewer words and more images is a great way to engage students and make your points clearer.
It does not matter the standard or class that you are teaching; your students will be able to retain your lessons much better when proper visuals are added to the presentations.
6. Highlight Your Main Points
Momentary distractions are pretty common and unavoidable, not just in a classroom but also in professional spaces. As a teacher, you must take adequate steps to help students refocus properly after such distractions. You may do so by highlighting the main points the slide talks about in bold or using contrast.
If there is an important keyword to note, you can also highlight that. These points may seem extremely simple, but small tweaks like these may engage your students better and help them learn a lot more than normal.
Wrapping Up
Teaching through presentations can be extremely informative and entertaining at the same time. As noted earlier, this set-up is in its nascent stage, and the teachers are always free to introduce innovations to make learnings seem relatively easier and more enjoyable.
