TGIF – Simple Slides Save Sight

As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.

Quote of the Week: “Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening.”   Dorothy Sarnoff

Humor Break (with thanks to Scott Adams):

Dilbert pointing to a slide: “I didn’t have any accurate figures so I made this one up.  Studies show that accurate numbers aren’t any more useful than ones you make up.

Member of the audience: “How many studies show that?”

Dilbert: “Eighty-seven.”

Stat of the Week: 6 Tips for More Effective Slides.  I confess.  I have taught oral presentations for many decades … and I still can’t get across to presenters that simple slides are more effective.  Writer Nancy Duarte won me over when she wrote: “Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus — the road — to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you’re saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them. Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they’re stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. Lots of extras actually take away meaning because they become a distraction. They overtax the audience’s cognitive resources.”

Action Tip: If you have an upcoming presentation, please heed the tips in the above link.

Self-Development Corner: I am back with more news about online learning.  Changes in how we learn are rolling in like a tsunami.  The US Department of Education this year issued a report called Understanding the Implications of Online Learning for Educational Productivity.  The report is aimed at secondary education and it admits it is guided by recent success in online learning at the university levels. If you still have children in school you might want to access the full report.

Most of you may wish to stop reading here.  Thank you and come back next week!  For those who would like a more detailed summary of what the Report suggests, listed below are the “nine applications of online learning that are seen as possible pathways to improved productivity (in school systems)”.

1) Broadening access in ways that dramatically reduce the cost of providing access to quality educational resources and experiences, particularly for students in remote locations or other situations where challenges such as low student enrollments make the traditional school model impractical;

2) Engaging students in active learning with instructional materials and access to a wealth of resources that can facilitate the adoption of research-based principles and best practices from the learning sciences, an application that might improve student outcomes without substantially increasing costs;

3) Individualizing and differentiating instruction based on student performance on diagnostic assessments and preferred pace of learning, thereby improving the efficiency with which students move through a learning progression;

4) Personalizing learning by building on student interests, which can result in increased student motivation, time on task and ultimately better learning outcomes;

5) Making better use of teacher and student time by automating routine tasks and enabling teacher time to focus on high-value activities;

6) Increasing the rate of student learning by increasing motivation and helping students grasp concepts and demonstrate competency more efficiently;

7) Reducing school-based facilities costs by leveraging home and community spaces in addition to traditional school buildings;

8 ) Reducing salary costs by transferring some educational activities to computers, by increasing teacher-student ratios or by otherwise redesigning processes that allow for more effective use of teacher time; and

9) Realizing opportunities for economies of scale through reuse of materials and their large-scale distribution.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.