Using Slideshows in Classroom Teaching: 7 Tips

Many articles have been written about the benefits of using slideshows in the classroom. It’s proven to be a useful tool for sharing information and carrying out interactive activities, such as quizzes and educational games. In this post, we’ll talk about some benefits of applying slides in teaching and share 7 tips for creating effective slideshows. So let’s begin.

Benefits of Using a Slideshow

One of the advantages of slideshows is the ability to integrate interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, and discussion prompts. Interactive slideshows create a dynamic learning environment and promote a sense of involvement among students. They encourage active participation and allow students to engage with the material in a hands-on manner. 

Besides, a slideshow can help you work with less unpredictability as it lets you plan everything ahead. And best of all, you can share your slideshow with those who have missed the class and post it online so students can go back and access it as reference material. 

Slideshow Making Tips

1. More Images, Less Text

While preparing a slideshow for a class, it might be tempting to add as much information as possible. But you need to remember that you should not use it to display everything you’re talking about during your lecture. The slides can only support you and make the knowledge more comprehensible. So, be sure to add plenty of images, videos, and graphics to help your students learn effectively. 

2. Consider the Slideshow Design

You don’t have to be a professional graphic designer to craft a good slideshow. But you still need to choose a cohesive color scheme, font styles, and layout. It’s also important to use contrasting colors and fonts that are big enough to be easily readable by your audience.

3. Create As Many Slides As You Need

Many educators try to make fewer slides, but there’s nothing good about it. Instead, you should create as many slides as you need. Let’s say you spend 10 minutes on 10 slides instead of making your audience look at the same slide for the same period of time. Doesn’t it seem more engaging and dynamic? 

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Be Funny

Emotional responses are key to aiding memory, so a little bit of humor in your slideshow won’t do any harm to your audience or your reputation. You don’t have to be a standup comic, though – just try to make the atmosphere in the classroom more friendly and emphasize some key points using humor to help the students remember them better. 

5. Animate Your Slides

Clarity and simplicity are definitely essential for an educational slideshow. But to keep it interesting and dynamic, you can apply a couple of animation effects. By animating the text, you can also choose when to show students extra steps or clues that might provide extra help. You can also add transitions and zoom in on photos. Just make sure you don’t overload the slides to keep the focus on the information. 

6. Get Rid of Any Distractions

You might have noticed that some teachers include banners, headers, and even page numbers in their slides. However, there are very few situations where such information might be required. Such redundant elements distract your students from the content of your slideshow. So, don’t hesitate to remove it.

7. Encourage Students to Participate 

Actively involve students in the learning process by prompting them to ask questions, share their thoughts, and contribute to discussions during the class. Also, take the time to gather feedback from students to reflect on the effectiveness of the slideshow. Take into account how well the material was received, identify areas for improvement, and consider adjustments for future presentations.

Can’t wait to create an educational slideshow for your next class, but not sure about what program to use? Here are some of the best options you can consider. For example, Google Slides and PowerPoint are popular options for many educators. But Google Slides is an online program, so you’ll need a stable Internet connection to use it. PowerPoint can be used offline, but it’s quite an expensive slideshow maker. 

If you’re an experienced user, you can check out some advanced video editors like DaVinci Resolve or iMovie. But if you want a dedicated slideshow maker that is easy to use, then you should try SmartSHOW 3D. This beginner-friendly software offers an extensive set of editing tools, dozens of text styles, and over 700 effects and pre-designed templates.

Summary

Now you know more about using slideshows in teaching. You have discovered a handful of tips to make a slideshow with no hassle. We have also discussed some benefits of using such tools and programs that you can use. It’s time to put it into practice – launch the software you like the most and create a professional-looking slideshow right now!

Calling all Architects and Engineers: 3 Steps to Tap Into Visualization with 3ds Max Tool

These 3ds Max tips for project visualization are courtesy of Arup Connect via Redshift partner ArchDaily, “the world’s most visited architecture website.” ArchDaily is dedicated to informing and inspiring architects worldwide to improve the quality of life for an estimated three billion people who will move into cities over the next 40 years.

Arup Connect is the online magazine of Arup, an independent firm of designers, planners, engineers, consultants, and technical specialists. For this article excerpt, Arup Connect interviewed Arup visualization specialist Anthony Cortez about how he uses 3ds Max, the skills visualization artists need during design and construction phases, and how augmented reality in construction is changing the face of visualization.

1. First Things First: What’s It For? 

“The strength of 3ds Max is its versatility,” Cortez says. “It’s not a one-industry tool. From film, visual effects, video games, and commercials to arch vis, people use Max for modeling, texture mapping, lighting, animation, and rendering. Architects use it to visualize models of buildings. There are game designers that use it to create game cinematics and environments; the visual effects industry uses it to create explosions and crowd simulations.

Read more on design, architecture, and gaming.

“Here at Arup we use all of that stuff that Hollywood and the game designers use, but we apply it to engineering applications. We have lighting engineers here in the office; they study how light hits surfaces and reflects off of and is absorbed by materials. We use 3ds Max to visualize how light physically behaves in real life. These days, it’s really hard to tell the difference between a photo and a rendering.

“There’s also a project that we’re working on, a new New York bridge, where we’re taking photography from various vantage points around the Hudson Valley area and camera-matching the new bridge design to the survey and photographs and create photorealistic visual impact studies, to show what designs look like so that they can move on to the next stage in the approval process.”

2. Minority Report is Here: 3ds Max and Augmented Reality. 

“Traditionally, the way we export out of 3ds Max is through renderings, still image renderings, or animations and real-time rendering game engines,” Cortez says. “But what’s also emerging is a platform called augmented reality (AR) where we’re able to take 3D objects and superimpose them onto the real world, and you’re able to interact with these 3D objects in real time, similar to what you would see in movies like Minority Report or Avatar or Ironman.

“We’ve used AR on a few projects by embedding building information models [BIM] onto site plans. When your smartphone or tablet recognizes the page, models are overlaid on top, giving you a better understanding of the site design in 3D.

“This application also works on the job site. Our engineers recently went to Montana for a project and were able to access geo-located design models and superimpose them on the landscape. The value of this is that it allows for real-time collaboration with clients by letting them preview things that the designers are proposing. This leads to better decision-making during the design process.”

(For more on the future of augmented reality, check out Meta’s augmented reality–enabled glasses.)

3. Get Your Game Up:  Design and Visualization Skills. 

“Having a good foundation of the principles of design is key,” Cortez says. “Having a good eye in regards to composition, attention to detail. Being able to understand how to interpret floor plans, elevations, and cross-sections. And also, on the visualization side, being able to understand how timing in animated objects works. Understanding the way light behaves when it interacts with physical materials, and then having a good sense of organization and optimization of these virtual scenes.

“Say you have several lights hit a surface and bounce off of it, then hit a window and go through two or three different levels of glazing of the glass so that it reflects and refracts. Some of the light goes through, some of it bounces off and hits the ceiling, etc. If all of that calculation is taking place, it could take hours to render a frame of animation. Whereas if you optimize a scene and adjust the geometry and materials settings, you can balance the time versus the quality of the render, so it wouldn’t take that long — maybe just a fraction of that time — but still have an acceptable level of quality.”

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