Supporting teaching by creating presentations

      Cranford Teague (2013) has pointed out that the aim of classroom presentations is to be a tool of helping student to acquainting and remembering information in an easy and facilitative way. However, some teachers fail to create successful presentations, so "they begin to rely on the slides to tell their story, rather than to help them tell the story".  Therefore he provides eight- Tips to Power-Up Your Classroom Presentations. First tip is using as many slides as you need. The number of slides does not determine the success of the provided presentation in conveying the aim. The determiners are covering and delivering information, and the time spending in each slide. Second, minimize verbosity by putting one idea in a slide and by not crowding the slide with so much information. Third, Maximize Visuals such as images, figures, and icons which help to make the teacher's point more understandable and clearer. Fourth, reducing noise in slides should be put in mind to avoid confusion such as "adding banners, headers, footers, page numbers" which are unhelpful and unnecessary. Fifth, make images and visuals big to have easier sight and memorization. Sixth, highlight what it is taking about to have students' attentions. Seventh, using transition changes can also help in delivering information for students. Finally, it is fine and useful to repeat a slide more than one. Such presentations in the classroom support teaching. 

(http://www.edutopia.org/blog/8-tips-classroom-presentation-jason-cranford-teague)

          In Technology course I have noticed from my teacher's presentations in lectures how a presentation should be to support the idea the teacher discusses, and how these presentations affect my understanding and comprehending information. In other courses I have seen lots of presentations as they are the main instructors' tool in lecturing, some of them are not clear for the reasons provided above. Therefore, I have sometimes hard time understanding what the teacher wants to emphasize and what is the point.

        Actually, I like the presentations provided in the technology courses and the take about how to use them. In addition, they were very helpful for me to understand how a teacher can make critical use of simple presentations as supporting teaching tool in his/her lecture.

       I think teachers need more workshops in how they can use this tool in teaching supportively. On the other hand, we as students need to have a facilitator tool in teaching as presentations to reduce the amount difficulty of some topics in courses. Moreover, I think knowing how to make supportive presentations in teaching does not help to only make power points but also it can help in creating other teaching tools by programs in a supportive way like ActiveInspire program, and videos' creating programs (PowToon), and Prezi .