No matter if we are students, educators, entrepreneurs or salesmen, we are all familiar with Powerpoint. During two decades, this piece of software from the Microsoft Office family has been the most used tool to present our academic and commercial ideas.

Nevertheless, our presentations are not always as effective as we expect and sometimes we can even trigger in our audience what is called Death by Powerpoint. What is the source of this problem? Is it always difficult to convey a message to our audience? The answer is simple: We have not a properly designed presentation!   We just need to apply some basic rules to improve the effectiveness of our message!

The following are some basic principles to avoid the Dead by Powerpoint.

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1.  Write a script: Planning is important, so before using Powerpoint define the message you want to convey. The human brain is designed to remember stories and no matter, if you are having an academic speech or an elevator pitch; creating a timeline and including the elements of a story, will help us to make it memorable.

2.  Don´t write paragraphs: Even if you want to show all your knowledge, slides are schematic tools, not documents. Your audience can either listen or read, so if you want to catch the attention of the participants, you must reduce the text in your slides.

3.  Be brief: No matter the length of the session, a presentation must be as short and precise as possible.   The average attention span is 20 minutes, and our working memory has a limited size. So, if you want an effective presentation, the less is often more. If 20 minutes is not enough include active pauses and allow your audience´s brain and eyes to get a rest.

4.  Don´t dismiss the style: Design is one of the most important elements if you want to catch the attention and be remembered.   Using animations, shadows and overloading your presentation with visual elements is a cause of distraction and could make you look unprofessional. Be careful choosing colors and fonts and use images to stand out your message.

5.  Avoid templates: After two decades of using Powerpoint, its templates can be boring and overused. Many of those templates are overloaded with text and their choice of colors and fonts are not the most appropiated.

6.  Be wise with bullets: Even if your presentation includes many topics, is not convenient to show them all on a single slide. A long list can overwhelm your audience, so you can distribute your bullets and topics in different slides and use images to avoid being boring.

7.  Include questions: Questions give you the chance of interacting with your audience and break the monotony. Including questions can also show that you are concern about your audience perspective. On the other side, the intellectual effort of recalling the answer improves the retention of the message that you want to convey.

As a teacher everyone have the need of feeling that is making a great job and that is changing lives; nevertheless we also know that is not easy to come to that point.   Your knowledge of pedagogy, charm and vocation are essential assets, but is also true that experience is the main factor to refine us as teachers and get connected with our students or audiences.

Experience give us the chance to learn through trial and error that you should “gain” the trust of your class to get the best results and also which elements could motivate and which ones could distract. However, all the groups are different making even more difficult to find the right strategies to foster a learning environment. Considering that is not easy to find and combine all the elements to be successful, you need passion to be a teacher and overcome all the challenges that this profession poses.

The new educational trends bring new challenges and opportunities to improve our performance, even if it is not easy to adapt us to the requirements that these methodologies bring. That is why is important to cultivate habits that ease our tasks and also incorporate technologies and strategies to facilitate the process.

On this post we share an infographic with 10 habits that could help to improve our performance; and also bring the human and emotional dimension to teaching.

We hope you find it useful and we welcome any further ideas for publication in a future issue.

Several educational institutions nowadays try to foster understanding without considering how the brain learns.   Average attention span on humans is not longer than 20 minutes in a passive way.   In addition, there is scientific evidence of  the role of emotions in learning.   So, is it essential to cast boredom from classrooms to improve learning.   These two factors have serious consequences on the academic level of institutions and countries. For instance, we can analyse the results of the global education survey by the  OCDE (Program for international student Assessment , PISA).  The program is testing every three years the performance of 15 year olds in key areas, showing which countries have reached a good performance and the ones that still have a long way to reach excellence.

The global survey also analyzes several educational  indicators, including motivation for learning, self awareness and learning strategies.  The results show that in most cases low performance is caused by poor  instructional models which  are related with  lack of motivation and liable to harm the academic development.

Flipwit consider to tackle this situation from a innovate approach, through interactive tools that improve the collaboration and retention of information in the classroom. Flipwit aim to improve the learning process through the interaction of teachers and students and the use of educational games in real time from their mobile devices (mobile phones, tablets and laptops) to bring emotion to the education of people.

Our software intends  to bring energy to presentations not just in classrooms but also in any educational situation.  Considering that  an adult attention span is about 15 and 20 minutes, it is essential to create interaction to  foster communication and transmit the gross of the message.  Flipwit  includes that property, allowing students to participate in real time through interactive games  which keep them focus  and generate dynamic debates and the participation of the whole class.

In addition, a study  related with the use of answering systems [3], have shown their benefits making  students  to enjoy the classes and be more connected to the contents. Furthermore,  there is scientific evidence   [4]  of  emotion being essential during the learning process; pointing out that  topics that stand out from the media and generate emotions can be more easily retained and consequently learned.  So, fostering interaction with students through an application have an substantial  potential as a mean to include emotion in learning.

In that sense, Flipwit gives the lecturer the chance to add interaction and trigger emotions through different games and integrated tools;  making our software the first  application on the market to innovate with this kind of features applied to learning.

Connecting technology and education not only  improves scope but also set a milestone in learning; because it tackles the student individual needs through personalization and interaction.  It creates a new framework, fostering collaborative learning and mostly offering a creative and flexible methodology which get closer to diversity and the real educational needs of individuals [5].

[1] PISA, B. (2017). Buenas y malas noticias para Colombia en pruebas PISA | ELESPECTADOR.COM. [online] ELESPECTADOR.COM. Available at: http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/educacion/buenas-y-malas-noticias-colombia-pruebas-pisa-articulo-669148.

[2] http://citl.indiana.edu/files/pdf/middendorf_kalish_1996.pdf

[3] https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/32/papers/8854/download

[4] https://autoconocimientointegral.com/2015/07/04/la-neurociencia-demuestra-que-el-elemento-esencial-en-el-aprendizaje-es-la-emocion/

[5] http://www.iseamcc.net/eISEA/Vigilancia_tecnologica/informe_4.pdf.