How to Create Engaging Educational PowerPoint Presentations

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Article by Nelli Gevorgyan

Content writer

How to Create Engaging Educational PowerPoint Presentations

Visual teaching is the best way to pass messages for learning purposes. However, there is an argument that using technical devices for education will interrupt students' thinking and creative capacity. 

These arguments are common in educational debates. On the other hand, delivering an idea with demonstrations has an immense impact on recalling and understanding a topic. So here comes the importance of engaging educational PowerPoint templates. 

The following article covers:

Why create an educational PowerPoint presentation?

Making educational PowerPoint presentations

Why create an educational PowerPoint presentation? 

Educational PowerPoint presentation will pass information to the audience with eye-catching visuals. So, it is both informative and introductory.  

It aims to familiarize the viewers with the topic. The viewers include students, business executives, researchers, and others seeking information.

PowerPoint is an effective tool for presenting study materials. Hence, it will help in the classroom and strengthen students' learning capacities. The educators may use supporting visuals like images, graphs, data-driven charts, and tables to pass an idea. Such visuals will help the viewer to get the idea effortlessly. 

Making educational PowerPoint presentations  

Let's look at the main steps it takes to create an engaging educational PowerPoint presentation. You can use  Google Slides ,  Keynotes , or any other presentation software to create one.  

#1 Define the objectives

First, you have to set a learning goal. It refers to what your audience will know after seeing your presentation. 

The objectives of the presentation may differ according to the type of presentation. The types include

  • Decision driven . This type of presentation is used when you need to achieve a common goal, so you need a presentation guide to help everyone in decision-making. 
  • Persuasive . These are mainly used when giving a business pitch or making a sales offer. 
  • Informative . As you can guess from the name, these presentations are mainly used to share knowledge or information.  
  • Introductory. 

You can set your objectives according to the type. Each of these types comprises different desired outcomes. 

#2 Focus on the target audience and accessibility 

For the presentation to achieve its purpose, you should know the strengths, weaknesses & needs of your target audience . 

For example, learners with visual or hearing impairments could not be able to access a PowerPoint presentation. They need help to go through images, sound, and graphics. Besides, you must consider the audience's age, language skills, and ability to interpret a concept. 

#3 Define what you want from an education PowerPoint presentation 

The purpose of learning should explain clearly and concisely. For example, what specific skills should a learner have to display, produce, and know as a result of the PowerPoint class? So, you make sure that outcomes should be attainable. 

#4 Plan your content  

After you determine your content, you should select the best format. You can create this format as table content, a data chart, a comparison diagram, a circular diagram, or a timeline template. 

For example, if you think of lecturing about key milestones of American Slavery prohibitions, your format should be a timeline PowerPoint.  Below you can see a simple  timeline template for American slavery prohibitions.  

  • Civil war  
  • Emancipation Proclamation 
  • Importance of 1965 
  • Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution 
  • Juneteenth  

Timeline infographic example

Source: Slidebazaar

This timeline would help you to create a sequential flow for your presentation. Then, if your topic is different, you can prepare another format. So, structuring a presentation is so important to hold your audience. 

The sequence should be simple and logical, allowing the viewer to keep up with them and take away key points. It also determines how much interaction you want from the audience. 

One more thing to remember when planning your content is the length of your speech. 

#5 Design the Slides    

Designing and arranging slides in a flow will give the necessary support for your PowerPoint presentation. Let’s see what you should and should not include in the slides. 

Decide on the numbers of Slides

  • In the real sense, the number of slides depends on your subject and time. However, you can use 10 slides for a 20-minute presentation. That means one Slide for two minutes to account for discussion to absorb the material. (If your lecture is under two minutes per Slide, you can add more slides for a 20-minute presentation.) 

Arrange slide contents  

  • Avoid too much text. Instead of long and heavy sentences, try to use brief points. Some of the best AI slides app options available these days can help you create one efficiently.
  • Follow the 6 x 6 rule . You can incorporate a maximum of 6 bullets with 6 words per bullet. 
  • Use large fonts . Ensure your text is good enough to read. You can use a font size of 36-40 for the heading and titles, and the subtext should be around 32-point font. 
  • Avoid ornate fonts . Stick to basic fonts because specialty fonts may be difficult to read. 

Make the content readable

  • Use bold, italics, and attractive colors to mark key points. 
  • Use dark backgrounds (black, blue, purple, etc.). Use a light typeface or light background (white, light blue, yellow, etc.). Or use a dark typeface for easy reading in a large room. 
  • Apply only two or three color combinations per Slide. Otherwise, it will distract viewers' attention. However, in the case of statistical diagrams, you can add more colors. For example, if you are using a pie chart with 5 or 7 distributions, you can use more colors. 
  • Try to avoid underlines because it denotes hypertexts. 

Add images clipart and graphics  

  • Use images and graphics only if  they support the content. Too many uses of these will obstruct viewers' learning. Use pictures and clipart sparingly. 
  • If a photo is essential, use simple pictures without decorations. 
  • Choose only two-dimensional graphs and data-driven charts . Avoid 3D styles since it obstructs reading accurate data. 
  • Place graphics appropriately, having accurate dimensions.

Use animations carefully 

Animations are catchy motion pictures. But they only give desired outcomes if you add them to your slides sensibly. For primary schools, animations may be essential to tell a story. But avoid using them for each Slide. Instead, you can add it for business presentations when you need a transition.

Avoid many ideas on one slide 

Cramming information into a single slide will overwhelm your audience. The learners may seem disinterested, so they will stop listening to you. 

Instead, only focus on one topic in a slide. It lets you cut off your speech about that material according to your scheduled time. 

Pay attention to slide arrangement

Flow and sequence is the soul of any presentation. So, to keep the audience's attention on the topic, follow the below order of slide arrangement. Use high-quality yet simple templates with relevant images. A common sequence may be the following:

  • Heading Slide  
  • Attention-grabber  Slide to make the audience interested in the speech and topic.  
  • Topic preview  
  • Content  
  • Transition  
  • Conclusion  
  • Q&A 

#6 Make the presentation interactive

Sometimes digital platforms have communication barriers. You can't easily understand students' body language and facial expressions. This is the reason you should come up with ways to keep the presentation interactive . 

Encourage participation from the beginning

Use separate PowerPoint slides before you start the core presentation. These slides should include a series of questions for students to answer while waiting for class to begin. You can arrange it in a quiz format.  

In the final session, consider having a question-and-answer session that includes a quiz about the topic you have covered. This session will provide an opportunity to receive feedback. You can also use QR codes to increase audience participation . QR Codes are a quick and engaging way to make your quiz more accessible, collecting feedback post the presentation, or encouraging email sign-ups.

Use quizzes polls and surveys 

Most of the teachers need clarification on where to include polls, quizzes, and surveys. Is it at the beginning, middle, or end? What we have in the beginning is what we already discussed. You can add surveys, polls, and quizzes from the middle to the end without losing the sequence and fluency. For example, if you are on the topic of climate change, you can take a class opinion poll where the student stands on climate change issues. 

#7 Practice and delivery  

Don’t read the presentation.  Rehearse the presentation with a sequential flow so that you can speak from bullet points. The text should be a hint for the presenter rather than a complete message for the students. 

Succinctly prepare and control over descriptions.  A presenter may already schedule their time allocations, so overly explaining causes stop your presentation halfway. Look at your watch when staring at each slide and control the presentation according to the prescribed time limit. 

Focus on audience.  Monitor your viewers body language and behavior rather than focusing on your slides. 

Use proper designs and diagrams. Many designs and charts are already incorporated into PowerPoint presentations. For example, if you want to display the cause-and-effect relationship between two or more items. You can use simple arrow connections or drawings showing the relationship. But if you want a professional touch, you can use a fishbone diagram to show the cause-and-effect relationship.  

PowerPoint presentation example

A few more tips for delivery   

  • Use microphones  
  • Choose clear and simple fonts 
  • Select high-contrast colors  
  • Include multiple-choice questions  
  • Use video files if necessary  

In this article, we have covered how easy it can be to create a presentation to educate learners with PowerPoint templates. The ways of using interactive components will determine their learning effectiveness. It will also make for more satisfied audiences, regardless of your subject. 

A presentation with visual aids enables the audience to understand the topic easily. It not only engages your audience but also helps the audience to recall the subject that you have discussed.  

If you are a provider of online education courses, you can use Uteach to create a course website within minutes. Besides, Uteach provides handy tools for coaching businesses that help you build end-to-end live sessions. So, if you want an online, scalable coaching business, then Uteach is the right choice for you. 

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Home Blog Presentation Ideas 23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging and Interactive Presentations

23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging and Interactive Presentations

23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging and Interactive Presentations

PowerPoint presentations are not usually known for being engaging or interactive. That’s often because most people treat their slides as if they are notes to read off  and not a tool to help empower their message.

Your presentation slides are there to help bring to life the story you are telling. They are there to provide visuals and empower your speech.

So how do you go about avoiding a presentation “snoozefest” and instead ensure you have an engaging and interactive presentation?  By making sure that you use your slides to help YOU tell your story, instead of using them as note cards to read off of.

The key thing to remember is that your presentation is there to compliment your speech, not be its focus.

In this article, we will review several presentation tips and tricks on how to become a storytelling powerhouse by building a powerful and engaging PowerPoint presentation.

Start with writing your speech outline, not with putting together slides

Use more images and less text, use high-quality images, keep the focus on you and your presentation, not the powerpoint, your presentation should be legible from anywhere in the room, use a consistent presentation design, one topic per slide, avoid information overwhelm by using the “rule of three”.

  • Display one bullet at a time

Avoid unnecessary animations

  • Only add content that supports your main points

Do not use PowerPoint as a teleprompter

  • Never Give Out Copies of the Presentation

Re-focus the attention on you by fading into blackness

Change the tone of your voice when presenting, host an expert discussion panel, ask questions, embed videos, use live polling to get instant feedback and engage the audience.

  • He kept his slides uncluttered and always strived for simplicity
  • He was known to use large font size, the bigger, the better.
  • He found made the complex sound simple.

He was known to practice, practice, and keep on practicing.

Summary – how to make your presentation engaging & interactive, fundamental rules to build powerful & engaging presentation slides.

Before we go into tips and tricks on how to add flair to your presentations and create effective presentations, it’s essential to get the fundamentals of your presentation right.

Your PowerPoint presentation is there to compliment your message, and the story you are telling. Before you can even put together slides, you need to identify the goal of your speech, and the key takeaways you want your audience to remember.

YOU and your speech are the focus of this presentation, not the slides – use your PowerPoint to complement your story.

Keep in mind that your slides are there to add to your speech, not distract from it.  Using too much text in your slides can be distracting and confusing to your audience. Instead, use a relevant picture with minimal text, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Use more images and less text

This slide is not unusual, but is not a visual aid, it is more like an “eye chart”.

Aim for something simpler, easy to remember and concise, like the slides below.

Keep in mind your audience when designing your presentation, their background and aesthetics sense. You will want to avoid the default clip art and cheesy graphics on your slides.

Use high-quality images for engaging presentations before and after

While presenting make sure to control the presentation and the room by walking around, drawing attention to you and what you are saying.  You should occasionally stand still when referencing a slide, but never turn your back to your audience to read your slide.

You and your speech are the presentations; the slides are just there to aid you.

Most season presenters don’t use anything less than twenty-eight point font size, and even Steve Jobs was known to use nothing smaller than forty-point text fonts.

If you can’t comfortably fit all the text on your slide using 28 font size than you’re trying to say and cram too much into the slide, remember tip #1.4 – Use relevant images instead and accompany it with bullets.

Best Practice PowerPoint Presentation Tips

The job of your presentation is to help convey information as efficiently and clearly as possible. By keeping the theme and design consistent, you’re allowing the information and pictures to stand out.

However, by varying the design from slide to slide, you will be causing confusion and distraction from the focus, which is you and the information to be conveyed on the slide.

Looking for beautiful PowerPoint Templates that provide you with a consistent design

Each slide should try to represent one topic or talking point. The goal is to keep the attention focused on your speech, and by using one slide per talking point, you make it easy for you to prepare, as well as easy for your audience to follow along with your speech.

Sometimes when creating our presentation, we can often get in our heads and try to over-explain. A simple way to avoid this is to follow the “ Rule of Three ,” a concept coined by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

The idea is to stick to only 3 main ideas that will help deliver your point.  Each of the ideas can be further broken into 3 parts to explain further. The best modern example of this “Rule of Three” can be derived from the great Apple presentations given by Steve Jobs – they were always structured around the “Rule of Three.”

Rule of Three PowerPoint Presentation

Display one sentence at a time

If you are planning to include text in your slides, try to avoid bullet lists, and use one slide per sentence. Be short and concise. This best practice focuses on the idea that simple messages are easy to retain in memory. Also, each slide can follow your storytelling path, introducing the audience to each concept while you speak, instead of listing everything beforehand.

Presentation Blunders To Avoid

In reality, there is no need for animations or transitions in your slides.

It’s great to know how to turn your text into fires or how to create a transition with sparkle effects, but the reality is the focus should be on the message. Using basic or no transitions lets the content of your presentation stand out, rather than the graphics.

If you plan to use animations, make sure to use modern and professional animations that helps the audience follow the story you are telling, for example when explaining time series or changing events over time.

Only add engaging content that supports your main points

You might have a great chart, picture or even phrase you want to add, but when creating every slide, it’s crucial to ask yourself the following question.

“Does this slide help support my main point?”

If the answer is no, then remove it.  Remember, less is more.

A common crutch for rookie presenters is to use slides as their teleprompter.

First of all, you shouldn’t have that much text on your slides. If you have to read off something, prepare some index cards that fit in your hand but at all costs do not turn your back on your audience and read off of your PowerPoint.  The moment you do that, you make the presentation the focus, and lose the audience as the presenter.

Avoid Giving Out Copies of the Presentation

At least not before you deliver a killer presentation; providing copies of your presentation gives your audience a possible distraction where they can flip through the copy and ignore what you are saying.

It’s also easy for them to take your slides out of context without understanding the meaning behind each slide.  It’s OK to give a copy of the presentation, but generally it is better to give the copies AFTER you have delivered your speech. If you decide to share a copy of your presentation, the best way to do it is by  generating a QR code  for it and placing it at the end of your presentation. Those who want a copy can simply scan and download it onto their phones.

Avoid To Give Out Copies of the Presentation

Tips To Making Your Presentation More Engaging

The point of your presentation is to help deliver a message.

When expanding on a particularly important topic that requires a lengthy explanation it’s best to fade the slide into black.  This removes any distraction from the screen and re-focuses it on you, the present speaker. Some presentation devices have a built-in black screen button, but if they don’t, you can always prepare for this by adding a black side to your presentation at the right moment.

“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”

Part of making your presentation engaging is to use all the tools at your disposal to get your point across. Changing the inflection and tone of your voice as you present helps make the content and the points more memorable and engaging.

One easy and powerful way to make your presentation interactive is experts to discuss a particular topic during your presentation. This helps create a more engaging presentation and gives you the ability to facilitate and lead a discussion around your topic.

It’s best to prepare some questions for your panel but to also field questions from the audience in a question and answer format.

How To Make Your Presentation More Interactive

What happens if I ask you to think about a pink elephant?  You probably briefly think about a pink elephant, right?

Asking questions when presenting helps engage the audience, and arouse interest and curiosity.  It also has the added benefit of making people pay closer attention, in case they get called on.

So don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if rhetorical; asking a question engages a different part of our brain. It causes us to reflect rather than merely take in the information one way. So ask many of them.

Asking questions can also be an excellent way to build suspense for the next slide.

Steve Jobs iPad launch presentation in Macworld 2008

(Steve Jobs was known to ask questions during his presentations, in this slide he built suspense by asking the audience “Is there space for a device between a cell phone and a laptop?” before revealing the iPad) Source: MacWorld SF 2018

Remember the point of your presentation is to get a message across and although you are the presenter, it is completely fine to use video in your PowerPoint to enhance your presentation.  A relevant video can give you some breathing time to prepare the next slides while equally informing the audience on a particular point.

CAUTION: Be sure to test the video beforehand, and that your audience can hear it in the room.

A trending engagement tool among presenters is to use a live polling tool to allow the audience to participate and collect immediate feedback.

Using a live polling tool is a fun and interactive way to engage your audience in real-time and allow them to participate in part of your presentation.

Google Slides Poll with Audience Questions

Google Slides has a built-in Q&A feature that allows presenters to make the slide deck more interactive by providing answers to the audience’s questions. By using the Q&A feature in Google Slides, presenters can start a live Q&A session and people can ask questions directly from their devices including mobile and smartphones.

Key Takeaways from one of the best presenters, Steve Jobs

He kept his slides uncluttered and always strove for simplicity.

In this slide, you can easily see he is talking about the battery life, and it uses a simple image and a few words. Learning from Jobs, you can also make a great presentation too. Focus on the core benefit of your product and incorporate great visuals.

Battery Steve Jobs Slides

Source: Macworld 2008

SlideModel.com can help to reproduce high-impact slides like these, keeping your audience engagement.

Engaging PowerPoint template with battery and minimalistic style

He was known to use large font sizes, the bigger, the better

A big font makes it hard to miss the message on the slide, and allows the audience to focus on the presenter while clearing the understanding what the point of the slide is.

He found made the complex sound simple

When explaining a list of features, he used a simple image and lines or simple tables to provide visual cues to his talking points.

Steve Jobs Presentation Styles

(This particular slide is referencing the iMac features)

What made Steve Jobs the master of presentation, was the ritual of practicing with his team, and this is simple yet often overlooked by many presenters.  It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking you don’t need to practice because you know the material so well.

While all these tips will help you create a truly powerful presentation , it can only achieve if applied correctly.

It’s important to remember when trying to deliver an amazing experience, you should be thoroughly prepared. This way, you can elevate your content presentation, convey your message effectively and captivate your audience.

This includes having your research cited, your presentation rehearsed.  Don’t just rehearse your slides, also take time to practice your delivery, and your tone.  The more you rehearse, the more relaxed you will be when delivering. The more confident you will feel.

While we can’t help you with the practice of your next presentation, we can help you by making sure you look good, and that you have a great design and cohesiveness.

How to deliver your next presentation

You focus on the message and content; we’ll focus on making you look good.

Have a tip you would like to include?  Be sure to mention it in the comments!

creating learning presentations

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Audience, Engaging, Feedback, Interactive, Poll, Rule of Three, Steve Jobs Filed under Presentation Ideas

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Very great advices!

Greetings ! A compact composed communication for the host to have an impact -VOICE

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

  • Carmine Gallo

creating learning presentations

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

creating learning presentations

  • Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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E-Learning PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint E-Learning: With these tips & tricks, you can quickly create your E-Learning presentation!

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You may already be familiar with the term E-Learning. In many professional fields, as well as in schools and universities, E-Learning PowerPoints are increasingly being used. But what exactly does E-Learning stand for?

In this article, we will explain how you can use PowerPoint to create your own E-Learning presentations.

What exactly is E-Learning?

E-Learning, which stands for electronic learning , refers to all forms of learning that are supported by electronic or digital media . If you are not familiar with the term E-Learning, you may recognize other terms such as online learning, multimedia learning, or e-didactics, which are used to describe the same concept.

The convenience of E-Learning is that it can take place from anywhere. Whether you’re at the beach, at home, or on a train, E-Learning has gained popularity, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In E-Learning, learning materials are provided digitally to learners. These materials range from podcasts and presentations to video courses. In this article, we focus on E-Learning presentations.

E-Learning: these are the advantages!

The benefits of E-Learning extend beyond its easy implementation during pandemic times. Below, we have summarized additional advantages that demonstrate why E-Learning is more popular than ever.

#1: Self-paced Learning

One of the advantages of E-Learning is that participants are not bound to a specific presentation timeframe because the learning content is available continuously. It doesn’t matter at what time of day or night the learning content is accessed, and participants can go through the content at their own pace. In a traditional lecture with a predetermined time limit, it is expected that every listener understands the content within that timeframe.

Once a slide has been presented and discussed, it is assumed that everyone has grasped and internalized the information. There is no opportunity to revisit specific slides. However, in E-Learning, participants can go through the slides as many times as they want and for as long as they need, allowing them to determine their own learning pace .

Furthermore, users can complete E-Learning modules according to their own learning preferences . This means that while one person may prefer learning with music, it may be detrimental for others to hear any background noise while studying.

As a result, participants can engage in self-paced learning and independently grasp the concepts.

#2: Location Independence

As mentioned earlier, a major advantage of E-Learning is that it can take place from anywhere . In particular, E-Learning presentations can be accessed from any location and through any device . Unlike a live presentation where audience members need to be physically present unless it is an online event, E-Learning presentations can be shared with people around the globe.

This means that you can work on E-Learning presentations even while on vacation or on the go.

#3: Easy Access to Knowledge

This is especially beneficial for people living in remote areas, far from major cities and potential event venues. With E-Learning, there is no need to travel to acquire knowledge and information that would typically be provided in live presentations. Additionally, E-Learning allows for access at any time and from anywhere, as long as a digital medium is available.

#4: Regular Updating of Learning Content

Since E-Learning presentations are available online, authors have the ability to update them . This ensures that users always have the most up-to-date information and are kept current. In contrast, with in-person presentations, once the talk is over and the audience has left the venue, there is no opportunity to correct or update what was said.

E-Learning allows for regular content updates , ensuring that learners receive the latest information and materials.

PowerPoint and E-Learning? Here’s how it’s done!

PowerPoint E-Learning thats how

PowerPoint offers many features that allow you to create a creative and effective E-Learning product . However, there are certain considerations to keep in mind. What works for a live presentation in front of an audience may require some adjustments for an online course.

That’s why in this paragraph, you’ll learn how to use PowerPoint to create E-Learning presentations in just a few steps.

At the beginning:

Like any other presentation, creating an E-Learning product in PowerPoint starts with a blank slide. It is advisable to begin with a completely blank slide rather than using a predefined template with a title and bullet points. This openness encourages creativity and allows you to design your own layout freely.

To learn how to create an appealing PowerPoint layout, you can refer to our blog post titled “PowerPoint Layout” on this topic.

The learning content should always be designed to be understandable , as this makes it easier to motivate and inspire participants.

Creating the learning unit:

The creation of the learning unit in E-Learning PowerPoint presentations differs from that of a linearly structured presentation . For E-Learning presentations, more complex structures with multiple levels or branching paths are recommended.

This helps learners navigate through the online course in various ways. Furthermore, it ensures that participants with different levels of knowledge are covered and can understand your content.

It is also advisable to remain open to an arrangement that suits your content during the creation of your learning materials.

Organizing with tabs:

By using tabs, you can bring order to your presentation and categorize your learning content. This paragraph will show you how. You can create a navigation bar with tabs using these tabs. This navigation bar allows you to connect learning content using duplicated slides and hyperlinks.

#1: Creating a starting slide

To build a navigation bar with tabs, it is important to create a starting slide first . This slide will be duplicated and equipped with hyperlinks later on.

1. To do this, create a r ectangular shape with any number of tabs, as shown on the slide. Color each tab in different colors. Then, duplicate this slide so that you have the same number of slides and tabs.

organizing you e learning presentation with tabs

2. On the duplicated slides, it is important to change the colors of the tabs accordingly. On the second slide , make the middle tab gray , and on the last slide, make the third tab gray . If you have more than three tabs, repeat this step until you have a different tab colored gray on each slide.

organizing you e learning presentation with tabs

3. Once you have created all the slides, label your tabs and slides . Make sure to label the correctly colored slide with the appropriate content.

#2: Add Hyperlinks

To allow users of your E-Learning presentation to navigate to different slides by clicking on a tab, you need to incorporate hyperlinks into your presentation. When someone clicks on the second tab of your presentation, the goal is for them to be directed to the corresponding slide for that tab.

The link is hidden in the background, but due to the consistent layout of the slides, it appears as if you are still on the starting slide, but in a different tab.

To add the hyperlinks as described above, follow these steps:

  • Select the tab, which is the shape above the slide, where you want to place a hyperlink. This should be a colored slide, as ideally, you should be on the gray-colored slide.
  • Then, under the “Insert” menu, choose the “Action” option.

add hyperlinks to your e-learning presentation

Here, under the “On Click” action, you can select a link to the desired slide. This can be the previous or next slide, as well as any other slide number X.

add hyperlinks to your e-learning presentation

  • Confirm your selection in the pop-up window by clicking “OK.”
  • To check if the hyperlink insertion was successful, you can view your E-Learning presentation as a slideshow . Click on the different tabs, and if the linked slides open, you have done everything correctly.

#3: Bonus Tip: Navigation Menu Instead of Navigation Bar

Even without tabs, you can incorporate hyperlinks into your E-Learning presentation. In addition to slides, actions such as switching between slides can be linked to text, images, or icons. You can add these in your E-Learning PowerPoint presentation following the same steps explained in point #2.

Discover in our blog article on “PowerPoint Icons” how to incorporate visual elements into your presentation using icons.

Add-Ins for Your E-Learning Presentation:

In addition to regular text slides, E-Learning offers a lot of freedom when it comes to incorporating additional add-ins.

Elements such as tests and quizzes are particularly suitable for ensuring that participants actively engage in the learning process. This not only encourages active participation but also promotes engagement. Unlike in live presentations, where participants mostly passively listen and watch, tests and quizzes require active thinking and interaction .

Adding audio tracks to accompany the E-Learning content or pre-recorded narrations can also help personalize the learning experience . Engaging multiple senses and creating immersive content enhances retention. For useful information on using audio comments in your presentation, check out our blog article on “ PowerPoint Voiceover “.

To learn more about creating interactive presentations and actively involving your audience, read our article on “ Interactive Presentations “.

Extra Tip: Make Your Presentations Engaging with Tips from Our Blog

Make your E-Learning presentation even more captivating for your audience . Your viewers will appreciate visual stimuli. Keep in mind that closing the presentation is just one click away . By strategically incorporating additional visual elements, you can prevent this.

Whether it’s animations, action titles, or storytelling, these topics can play a complementary and engaging role in creating your E-Learning presentation. Visit our blog to find helpful tips on these topics and much more!

Conclusion: E-Learning Made Easy with PowerPoint!

As you can see, PowerPoint offers numerous possibilities for E-Learning projects and allows for a lot of creative freedom . Try out our tips and create engaging E-Learning presentations in no time!

Do you have an idea for an E-Learning application, but need some missing pieces for its implementation? In our shop, you will find various templates such as graphics, icons, maps, or animations that can assist you in creating your E-Learning project . Visit the Shop

If you have any questions about E-Learning or PowerPoint in general, feel free to contact us at [email protected] . We are here to help!

Other articles that might interest you:

  • PowerPoint Voiceover
  • PowerPoint Icons
  • Interactive Presentations
  • PowerPoint Layout
  • Universty Presentations
  • Ace Your Viva Presentation

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Learning Revolution

Optimizing PowerPoint for E-learning

By Jeff Cobb .  Last Updated on September 29, 2023

Photo of e-learning graphic on a laptop

Times have changed and the world has fully opened its eyes to the value of e-learning. Traditional learning methods that require you to be at a certain time and place can be an inconveniencing interruption to our often-busy schedules. And from an instructional perspective, you have to balance creativity with practicality.

So that begs the question, how can you create engaging courses that minimize interruptions to our schedules and are convenient for both the learner and instructor?

If you’ve ever created lectures, presentations, or even webinars using Microsoft PowerPoint, then you’ve overcome more than half of the e-learning curve. But while PowerPoint is a great tool, it’s not adequate on its own to captivate learners.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to convert your presentations into an on-demand and fully active online experience.  

PowerPoint vs. E-learning

PowerPoint is a classic presentation tool that has its place in face-to-face learning. But because it naturally follows a linear presentation structure – that is, each slide in the presentation is presented in a predefined sequence – it allows for minimal audience participation. However, in the classroom environment, this lack of interactivity is often supplemented with questions, (marked) assessments, group activities, and assignments. In this way, PowerPoint merely supports the instructor, who picks up the slack and effectively delivers the content by speaking, using body language, and interacting with the audience directly in real-time.

Unfortunately, that’s why you see so many poorly-designed and un-engaging PowerPoint presentations.

With all those bulleted lists and cheesy clip art, your PowerPoints might merely function as cue cards in the classroom. But this type of presentation structure does not smoothly transition into asynchronous e-learning. Still, that doesn’t mean that you need to throw your PowerPoints out and start from scratch. They still give you a solid foundation to build up from.

Before we get into the particulars of how to optimize your PowerPoint presentations for e-learning, let’s look at some key e-learning criteria and determine to what degree PowerPoint fulfills them.

E-learning vs. PPT comparison chart

As you can see, there are some clear similarities between e-learning courses and PowerPoint presentations. The main difference is that PowerPoint relies more heavily on the instructor to convey information more effectively, whereas e-learning relies exclusively on the objects within the courses to do so. To bridge this gap, we need to rethink our PowerPoint designs without factoring in an instructor. We need to give them a full-makeover.

In the rest of the article, I’m going to show you how to accomplish this.

Giving Your PowerPoint a Makeover

Believe it or not, the success of an e-learning course can largely be attributed to its visual appeal. Don’t simply rely on the topic and content of your course to carry your learners through. You don’t just want to pay attention to the visual aspect from a branding and marketing perspective: you’ll also need to leverage layouts, colors, images, etc. to enhance or emphasize key messages throughout the lessons.

Style and Colors

The “style” pertains to the overall look and feel of the course. One key element of style is color. Others include the layout, theme, visuals, etc.

One mistake people make when creating the style of their course is making decisions too hastily or mindlessly. Your favorite color combination might be red and black, but it’s not about you – it’s about your target audience. So, first things first: you’ll need to evaluate your audience using demographics like age, sex, education, prerequisite knowledge, etc. Moreover, you’ll need to consider your style from a business perspective and how it contributes to the “flavor” of your organization.

Once you’ve made some of these executive decisions, then you can descend from aerial view and start considering how your content can be broken down into elements and then designate colors. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll want to start with a light-colored background with dark-colored text for easy online viewing. Then, select a few appropriate colors for things like arrows, navigation buttons, indicators, etc. Your color palette(s) can and should be documented and saved for future courses.

Themes, Layouts, and Backgrounds

When giving your PowerPoint a makeover, you’ll have to incorporate themes for different “learning events”. For example, your e-learning course might have unique slides for your table of contents, title, presentation, interactions, and quizzes. Think about the elements that would naturally exist on each of these types of slides and design layouts that logically organize these elements. This might involve redesigning some of your slides or creating a theme for a new type of slide that you’ll be including in your e-learning course.

Each layout should have a unique background for each of these learning events. If you have graphic design skills that’s great, but if not – no problem! You can also create professional looking themes by keeping things simple. Look online for simple layouts/templates that might contain a title and text box. Or for your assessments, find and/or emulate a layout that has a question area and designated space for multiple choice options. Would you like to incorporate questions that incorporate images? Then factor that into your theme design.

And of course, maintain the same color scheme/palette that you determined for your style/branding.  

Making Your Slides Less Dense

When you’re creating e-learning courses, to keep your learners engaged, you have to “keep it moving”. This means that your audience shouldn’t be staring at the same slide for too long. From an instructional design perspective , dense slides do your learning audience a disservice because they likely over-rely on one type of learning style, such as auditory (audio), verbal (text), or visual (images).

So, how do you go about thinning things out in a systematic manner that doesn’t detract from your audience’s learning potential?

Well first develop or review your learning objectives. Keep them in mind as you comb through your content, eliminating any extraneous, redundant, or irrelevant information. If your content is text-heavy or full of bulleted lists, as is typical with PowerPoint presentations, then consider turning them into learning interactions. For example, the audience might have to check off a checkbox next to each bullet point before proceeding to the next slide, and in other cases, or – to cater to tactile learners – you can turn these bulleted “steps” into a process, tabs, or accordion interaction.

PowerPoint presentations tend to contain fewer slides that are highly dense because the instructor usually tackles each element on the slide systematically to break things down and provide the story behind the slide. Because the instructor is using his/her voice and intonation to emphasize important aspects of the message, while simultaneously asking and engaging the audience’s questions, learners can stay engaged and effectively cement knowledge.

On the other hand, e-learning slides tend to be “thin” and contain a lot of “white space” so that only the most important elements on the slide are showing. The learner should be able to logically assemble the “story” behind the slide with minimal text, some images to reinforce the message, and possibly audio.

Incorporating Meaningful/Relevant Visuals

While your PowerPoint presentation most likely includes some degree of images and visuals, you’re going to have to amplify them for your e-learning course. Part of the value of visuals is that they can package a thousand words, which – as previously discussed – can make your e-learning slides less dense.

Another reason why visuals are important is because most of us are naturally inclined towards processing visual information. Visuals can add meaning and therefore reinforce learning. You can create your own simple objects and diagrams using PowerPoint shapes. And, of course, there are also plenty of resources that you can use to source images, characters, infographics, and diagrams.

But the main thing is ensuring that your visuals are meaningful and relevant. An overabundance of visuals detracts from your message and can cause confusion. They should be chosen with purpose . So, if you haven’t clarified your course purpose and learning objectives yet, make sure that they’re established before you start incorporating images and determining your overall style.

Resources for PowerPoint Templates and ID Art

The internet has countless resources to help professionals and newcomers alike hit the ground running. From templates, backgrounds, and audio, to icons, graphic assets, and fonts – everything can be sourced.

Here’s a list of 10 great e-learning assets and resources:

  • eLearningArt – A vast library of eLearning images, illustrations, characters, graphics, and templates.
  • eLearning Brothers – Similar to eLearningArt. It offers character cutouts, eLearning and PowerPoint templates, images, icons, and stock assets.
  • Articulate Community – They offer a variety of templates for a wide range of presentation software, as well as course design assets (backgrounds, buttons, fonts, icons, etc.).
  • Public Domain Image Resources – There are many images and other resources available online that are in the public domain. This link will bring you to an exhaustive Wikipedia list of these free resources. Just be sure to follow their credit attribution instructions.
  • LA County Museum of Art – This resource provides over 20,000 free images. Any image that displays a “Download” button is free for the taking.
  • eLearning Asset – They offer a host of characters in office, medical, and industrial work environments, as well as cartoon mascots, office backgrounds, human silhouettes, and other freebies.
  • The Getty is a search gateway that yields a manifold of art images in the public domain.
  • PresentationGo offers a wide assortment of both free and paid-for Powerpoint/presentation templates, charts/tables, diagrams, graphics, etc.

Bringing Your PowerPoint Presentations to Life

There are ways that you can bring your PowerPoint presentation to life and have it captivate your audience on its own accord. PowerPoint has way more features than are often leveraged by presenters/instructors. You have the ability to incorporate a wide range of multimedia and even animate your slides and include transitions.

You can incorporate your own images or source them, record and edit audio, upload videos from your computer, or embed videos from external sources.

The easiest way to insert images is to copy and paste them or save and import them into your PowerPoint. Simply go to Insert -> Images .

Screenshot - Insert image in PPT

As you can see, the Insert menu gives you ample options. For example, you can also insert shapes, audio, and video. The key is to engage as many learning styles as possible. Not everyone learns best with words and speech, but almost everyone responds better to visuals than text, so refrain from too many bulleted lists. They have their place, but use them wisely. For example, you can even treat each bullet point as an “object” that can be animated to appear in time with your narration/speech.

You can take advantage of PowerPoint’s many Entrance effects. These effects are used to introduce new objects (e.g., text, images, graphics, etc.) onto the screen. For example, you can have objects “Fade in”, “Fly in” from a specific location on the screen, or simply “Appear.”

Screenshot - PPT Animation

Conversely, you have a wide assortment of “Exit” effects for when you’d like objects to disappear from the screen.

Screenshot - PPT Animation - Exit

In addition, you can use Emphasis effects, which “underline” or “highlight” certain objects on the screen to direct your audience’s attention to a key point or message.

Screenshot - PPT Animation - Emphasis

You can even create path animations that move objects about on the screen. This is probably the closest to an “animation”, as traditionally defined.

Screenshot - PPT Animation - Path Animation

All of these animations/animation types can be combined and timed to appear after or concurrently with one another. You can even set the duration of each animation and specify how long to delay an animation if it’s proceeding after another.

Screenshot - PPT Animation - Duration

You can also leverage PowerPoint’s transition effects when transitioning between slides. For example, if you’re teaching a writing class, presenting a new work, or conducting a literary analysis, then you might want each slide transition to emulate turning a page in a book.

Screenshot - PPT Transitions

As you can see, there are many ways to bring your PowerPoint presentations to life. But there are ways that you can also infuse interactivity into your presentation. Typical PowerPoint presentations involve the learner progressing “on-click”. While this infuses some degree of tactile learning, you can take things up a notch by providing navigation. Not only does it take you away from the linear progression that’s so endemic to PowerPoints, but you can have learners essentially “choose their own adventure”.

That notwithstanding, interactivity is a prime feature of e-learning. So, even with navigation links, your PowerPoints are bound to fall short in this category. Thus, to truly optimize your PowerPoint for e-learning, you’re going to have to convert them or use them in combination with an e-learning authoring tool.

In the next section, I’m going to show you how to leverage PowerPoint for e-learning.

Leveraging PowerPoint to Create and Sell E-learning

While PowerPoint is a powerful tool for instructors, the presentations on their own make for rather poor and largely ineffective e-learning. Nonetheless, you might have noticed that a large percentage of e-learning courses take on a slides-based approach. Webinars, employee training or academic courses, and even videos are often created with slides. So, at its foundation, PowerPoints are essentially e-learning presentations with minimal to no interactivity.

For example, you can’t use PowerPoint to create drag and drop, dropdown, and/or process interactions. Nor can they be leveraged to create interactive quizzes – a near must-have in e-learning ( how else can you determine if learning objectives are being met? ). Consequently, PowerPoints are often used as storyboards for later development with eLearning authoring tools. As a matter of fact, many industry-standard e-learning authoring tools, such as Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and iSpring Suite, can readily convert PowerPoints into e-learning. ( More on these course creation tools here .)

Converting PowerPoints with Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate is a great e-learning authoring tool that requires a moderate level of technical know-how to wrap your head around it. As soon as you open Adobe Captivate, you’ll have the option to create a new presentation by importing from PowerPoint. If you’re on a PC, Adobe Captivate will enable you to edit your slides and add interactivity within an internal “PowerPoint environment.” However, if you’re on a Mac, then you’ll need to link your Captivate presentation to your external PowerPoint file, otherwise termed the “source file”.

Here are a few things you’ll need to note when importing your PowerPoints into Captivate.

  • Captivate doesn’t retain the individual objects on your PowerPoint slides, so if you have some text and images in your slides, it all becomes one flat, static image, kind of like a background image. So, ideally, your PowerPoint presentation should be ready to publish. All you’d be doing is adding quizzes/knowledge checks and incorporating interactive graphics.
  • Any animations you create in PowerPoint are imported in Captivate as Shockwave Flash files (swf). However, at the end of 2020, Adobe will no longer be supporting these files.
  • The latest 2019 version of Captivate enables you to import PowerPoints as a responsive project. That is, it converts the swf files into an HTML5 format, meaning your courses can be viewed on mobile devices ( a very important development/consideration! )

Converting PowerPoints with Articulate Storyline

Articulate Storyline is an intuitive e-learning authoring tool that can seamlessly convert your PowerPoint presentations into e-learning. However, if you’re a Mac user, then you’re out of luck. This awesome software is only supported on PCs. But one aspect that makes Storyline a superior choice to Captivate is that when you import your slides, it retains all the individual objects on each slide.

In other words, you can pick up right where you left off and continue developing your course without having to cut/copy and paste individual objects. Moreover, I find that Storyline’s interactive graphics are much more attractive and “up to date” than Captivate’s.

Aside from that, not many differences lie between the two authoring tools.

Converting PowerPoints with iSpring Suite

Another standard authoring tool that enables you to optimize your PowerPoints for eLearning is iSpring Suite . Of the options we’ve thus far discussed, iSpring Suite perfectly integrates with PowerPoint. That is, it is a PowerPoint-based tool kit that almost entirely preserves the PowerPoint interface while adding the extra functionality required to create full-fledged e-learning courses.

Once you’ve installed iSpring , it appears as a tab in the PowerPoint ribbon, as shown below:

creating learning presentations

You can record and add media using your external/built-in microphone and webcam. Whether you want to create a screencast, talking head video, or do a picture-in-picture video that combines the two types simultaneously, you can do everything out of iSpring. And of course, you can upload, import, or embed external videos.

And as with any full-fledged e-learning authoring tool, you can create quizzes, interactive graphics, dialogue simulations, and branched scenarios to immerse your audience.

Publishing Your E-learning

You have many options to publish your e-learning. You can always export your PowerPoint presentation as a movie and post it to your website, YouTube, and/or share it on social media. But if you’re looking for a more professional mode of delivery that’ll enable you to track student progress, garner course and learner analytics, and even monetize your courses, then you’re better off with a learning management system (LMS) .

LMSes are great, as most people learn on the go. No one’s going to download a course to their mobile device, as they consume too much storage space. Moreover, as the course creator , LMSes give you the power to administrate, receive assignments and quizzes, and take on a more active role in teaching your learners. On the contrary, if you’re looking for a relatively-hands free solution, then an LMS enables you to create learning paths and drip course content periodically or based on student progress, generate grades or scores, and even issue completion certificates!

Any e-learning authoring tool that’s worth its salt will allow you to export and publish the final product in a way that seamlessly integrates with an LMS. There are “languages” or “technical standards” by which an LMS can effectively “communicate” with your course content. SCORM is one of the most widely-used technical standards, but you also have AICC and newer standards like TinCan.

Authoring tools such as Captivate, Storyline, and iSpring are able to publish e-learning in any one of these standards in order to retain interactivity. So, when choosing an LMS system , ensure that it is compatible with the format in which you published your course. For example, Thinkific doesn’t support any of these technical standards, whereas Flora LMS only supports SCORM.

PowerPoint for E-learning: Key Takeaways

  • PowerPoint is best used as a supplementary tool for instructors. Therefore, it enables passive versus active learning. It would be hard to keep asynchronous learners engaged and hold them accountable for their learning if you used PowerPoint as a standalone e-learning course.
  • PowerPoint accommodates a wide range of multimedia, including animation and transition effects, but to truly make your course interactive (quizzes, drag and drops, interactive graphics, etc.), you’ll need to convert your PowerPoint to e-learning by way of an e-learning authoring tool.
  • Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and iSpring Suite are powerful, industry-standard authoring tools that can easily convert your PowerPoint slides into e-learning. But because of Captivate’s limitations with retaining objects, you’ll have much less headaches working with Storyline and especially iSpring.
  • Consider publishing your course to an LMS system. If your course contains interactive elements and features, then be sure to export it as a SCORM, TinCan, or AICC package and ensure that your LMS supports these formats.

By Sydney Mansaray for Learning Revolution

  • iSpring Suite: Create Professional Courses Using PowerPoint
  • How to Record a PowerPoint Presentation

Title image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

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Nice! Even with e-learning, PowerPoint is still a program that is used by a majority of people. May I suggest you take a look at the free iSlide PPT add-in? It will save you and your readers a lot of time! For example, read this article below. Just register an email address to get started for free and start using thousands of templates, icons, vectors, images and more! islide-powerpoint.com/en/support/tips-ideas/15-minutes-en Please contact me if you have any questions that I can help you with. Regards, Silvia

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Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Presentations > Creating Presentations to Connect with Each Type of Learner

Creating Presentations to Connect with Each Type of Learner

When you’re presenting a topic to an audience, you want to ensure that it resonates with your entire audience. However, adults have different learning styles that affect how they absorb information. By understanding these styles of understanding and retaining information, you can tailor aspects of your presentation to these different kinds of learners to ensure that no one will feel left behind.

creating learning presentations

How to Craft Presentations that Connect with Different Types of Learners

Each person learns and understands information differently. Imagine that you’ve gotten turned around in an unfamiliar city and need to find your way back to your hotel. If you refer to a map, you might be a visual learner. If you ask for directions, you might be an auditory learner, but if you take the time to write those directions down, you might be a reading/writing learner. If you prefer to wander and find your way on your own, your learning style might be more kinesthetic. While this is a very simple example of different learning styles, it’s easy to see that what works for one person may not work for an entire audience at a presentation.

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Tell your story with captivating presentations

Powerpoint empowers you to develop well-designed content across all your devices

Learn more about the different styles of learning and how to tailor your presentations to include each one.

Visual Learners

Use charts, graphics, and videos to appeal to visual learners.

How they learn

A visual learner absorbs and retains information that’s presented visually. If you’re trying to show the relationship between a set of numbers, a chart or a graph is your best bet. In order for you to make an impact on a visual learner, you’ll need to use something other than just words in order for the, to realize the relationships between data and concepts.

Tactics for reaching them

Your presentation should lean on visual aids. A few examples of this include:

  • Sharing an outline of what information is going to be covered during the presentation.
  • Using graphs and diagrams to present your data.
  • Use a bright color scheme that incorporates complementary colors to draw their eye to what you’re sharing.
  • Encourage your audience to take notes and write down key facts.
  • Visually map out your concepts and connect information with arrows. Infographics are a great tool for this.
  • Make your presentation more engaging by embedding videos.

Auditory Learners

Speak loudly and clearly to connect with auditory learners.

In school, the auditory learners in your classes would simply remember everything their teachers said, instead of taking notes. They simply find it easiest to remember information that they hear and may understand and remember knowledge gleaned from lectures, discussions, audiobooks, podcasts, and having a conversation with another person. It may also be normal for an auditory learner to recite facts to themselves as a way to retain information. They may ask repetitive questions as a way to memorize a concept.

Most presentations rely on a speaker sharing information, which is incredibly helpful to an auditory learner. However, there are other ways that you can help them retain the content you’re presenting:

  • Record your presentation so that your audience can listen to it again later.
  • Move around the room while you’re presenting so that the audience sitting in the back can hear you more clearly.
  • Practice your delivery so that you aren’t giving your whole presentation in monotone. Changing your inflection and stressing important words and topics will resonate with auditory learners.
  • Embed videos or sound clips into your presentation, which will have the added benefit of reaching visual learners, too.

Reading/Writing Learners

Reading/writing learners will appreciate it if you share your notes after your presentation.

This text-based learning style is popular with teachers and students because it’s all about written words. Those who favor a reading/writing learning style are likely to retain what they read and benefit from information that is presented in a textual format.

Reading/writing learners appreciate a well thought out PowerPoint presentation that thoroughly explains its concepts via text. But you can share information in other ways, too:

  • Once you’ve finished discussing a concept, provide an easy to digest summary of the information you’ve shared. You should provide a similar summary at the end of your presentation that mentions all the important points you’ve shared.
  • If possible, prepare a transcript of your presentation, or share your slides and notes with your audience.
  • Provide note-taking materials like notebooks and pens for your audience to use during the presentation.
  • Keep your presentation’s formatting consistent. Don’t switch fonts midway through, it may throw off those who learn by reading.

Kinesthetic Learners

Include a physical element in your presentation for kinesthetic learners.

When some people purchase furniture that requires assembly, they’ll take a close look at the instructions. Kinesthetic learners will throw those instructions away and figure it out as they go. These types of learners absorb information through real life examples and exercises. They appreciate demonstrations, simulations, and experiments. If there is a physical aspect to a learning situation, a kinesthetic learner will benefit from it.

If you’re teaching a kinesthetic learner how to cook a dish, you can put your recipe book away. They’re much more likely retain that dish’s information if they’re allowed to cook alongside you. Tailor your presentations to kinesthetic learners by allowing them to learn from experience with tactics like:

  • Physical exercises like role playing to ensure they understand a concept.
  • Asking them to write down what they hear.
  • Allowing your presentation to have some aspect of physical participation, even it’s as simple as an informal poll involving raised hands.

Not all adults use the same tactics to learn and retain new information. By understanding the various learning styles, you can adjust your presentations to reach your whole audience.

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Our Top 8 Tips For Creating Effective Training Presentations!

Table of contents.

Staff training for all employees, including managers, supervisors, and executives, is vital to an efficient and safe working space. For optimal results, you not only need active participants and good public speaking skills, but you need effective training materials that are easy to digest.

If you’re hoping to create a staff training PowerPoint presentation, or any other training material, this is the place to be. Here’s our guide to creating effective training presentations that leave lasting impressions on your trainees .

What Is A Training Presentation?

As many individuals in the human resources department know, employee training is mandatory for employees to complete when they start a job.

A training presentation is a learning material that helps build the right skills that employees need in order to perform their jobs accurately. For optimal results, your training presentations should include lessons that showcase the specialized knowledge in well-structured and easy-to-read slides .

An effective presentation will create a great learning experience for your audience and will illustrate the main message throughout the presentation.

Youth Employment Services Training Presentation

Youth Employment Services (YES) was faced with the challenge of developing a training series aimed at you guessed it, increasing youth employment. A typical PowerPoint just wasn’t captivating enough, so we gave them an engaging presentation from start to finish.

creating learning presentations

Why Are Effective Employee Training Presentations Beneficial To My Company?

Providing relevant training information to your team is extremely important to the overall safety and efficiency of your company. A solid training presentation that can provide knowledge and important information to your participants can benefit your company in a number of ways. Here are just a few that come to mind:

Peace Of Mind

First, a training presentation can provide peace of mind to your organization. When your team members fully understand the importance of safety requirements or the different responsibilities of their job, it means you can rest assured that they are well equipped for daily tasks and emergency situations.

Employee Retention

Another benefit of effective training presentations is employee retention. When your employees fully understand their role in your organization and feel equipped and supported, they are more likely to stay in their role. Also, knowledge is power and development/progression is more than just monetary.

Setting Standards & Expectations

Finally, an effective training course will ensure that your team members have a set of clear expectations and standards to hold to throughout their time at your company. Clear expectations for your employees can not only lead to a more efficient workplace, but can also create a safer and healthier work environment.

5 Tips That Ensure You Have An Effective Training Presentation

A graphic of 5 hands holding up fingers with the text 'marketing presentation'

Now that we understand what a training presentation is and why a good presentation is so beneficial for your company, we can focus on how to create a professional and effective training presentation.

Here are 5 training presentation tips that you can use to enhance your training Powerpoint slides and keep the materials interesting to your audience:

Tell Your Story And Articulate Your Learning Goals

When you present your training course to your employees, you want to first start with a summary of the organization’s story and what your main goals are. Your brand’s story should be woven throughout the presentation so that everything ties back together. This solid structure will allow you to build off it and further engage your audience.

In order to engage your team you want them to understand why your business exists and what the main mission or key goals are. When you include these things in your Powerpoint presentation, you can further engage your audience.

As seen in this training presentation for Soccer Shots , the organization’s mission and main goals are clearly articulated at the beginning of the training session.

creating learning presentations

Make Your Presentation Accessible

In order to even fully engage your students at a training session, they need to be able to hear the presenter and see and read the slides.

Creating an accessible presentation will allow every person in the audience to gain knowledge from the Powerpoint slides.

Accessibility can mean different things for different people, so it’s important to know what kind of needs your audience requires. For example, you may need to use a larger text size, a microphone, a clear font, sign language, or narration throughout the presentation.

As a presenter, it’s important to ensure that everyone present at the session is able to reach each slide, complete each task, and can hear the trainer’s speech.

Cater To Different Learning Styles

Another aspect of a good training presentation is understanding that everyone learns differently. Where some employees can gain a lot of knowledge from slides full of bullet points, other employees may need more interactive elements during the training presentation.

To ensure that your professional training presentation appeals and engages all types of learners, you should try to include a variety of elements in your PowerPoint presentation design .

creating learning presentations

For example, you might include more graphics, images, or videos that can talk for you. Or, you can have specific conversations starters where participants can engage in conversation with the trainer and the other audience members.

Too much text can lead to an information overload that can cause participants to zone out while the trainer is talking. Instead, structure your presentation slides with some white space so your audience isn’t overwhelmed with information.

Use Real World Examples In Your Training Sessions

Another way to boost training skills in a good training presentation is throughout using real life examples. While data charts and abstract ideas can provide extremely helpful information to participants, real world examples can allow that information to stick.

People are more perceptive to ideas that make an impact on their own lives. So, if you include examples from daily life to illustrate and explain your point, you may find that your audience is more engaged in the training presentation.

Now, use your findings to integrate realistic situations as examples or exercises that show trainees the value of your session. The key to an engaged and motivated audience is to keep things real.

Design Is Critical, So Don't Underestimate It

One of the most important tips for creating effective training presentations is that design matters. As much as it may seem that the information is more important than the design for a training course, the design is actually very critical.

Not only can your design reinforce your brand image and brand identity, but it can further engage your participants. Charts that showcase data and information, graphics, high quality images, eye catching colours, and smooth transitions can all help you make a powerpoint presentation that gets your point across effectively.

A great presentation template and slide deck will have a organic design that not only pleases the eye, but will explain important information to your audience.

Consider Additions or Alternatives To Help Support Your Training Efforts

An effective presentation isn’t just about the slides. There are other components that you need to keep in mind before leading your presentation.

Practice Your Presentation Skills

For one, the trainer will need to practice the presentation ahead of the course.

Good public speaking skills and having a strong idea of what you are talking about can all help with creating an effective and engaging presentation.

creating learning presentations

Use Effective Handouts

You may also want to use handouts to aid your presentation, but make sure it isn’t just information that is already on a slide in your presentation.

Whether it’s an article with more information, notes about the course, a summary of information, or further tips, handouts can be beneficial for your audience.

Hire a Design Agency

Finally, you should consider hiring a presentation design agency to help you create these slides.

While a presentation template can be a good starting point, a great presentation requires a lot more time, effort, and skill. A professional design agency can take this task off your hands so you can focus on the speech aspect.

This was the case for a Lawyer at BelkerPalm Legal who was giving a presentation to a group of law students. Although his experience was vast and his presentation skills were strong, he didn’t have the visuals to back him up. He was relieved to find the Geeks!

creating learning presentations

Need Help Designing Your Training Materials?

Look no further than the geeks!

We’re a presentation and training manual design company that truly understand how crucial it is building effective training materials for new employees. We’ve done it for clients, and ourselves, but we always put you first.

Author:  Content Team

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How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation (Step-by-Step)

  • PowerPoint Tutorials
  • Presentation Design
  • January 22, 2024

In this beginner’s guide, you will learn step-by-step how to make a PowerPoint presentation from scratch.

While PowerPoint is designed to be intuitive and accessible, it can be overwhelming if you’ve never gotten any training on it before. As you progress through this guide, you’ll will learn how to move from blank slides to PowerPoint slides that look like these.

Example of the six slides you'll learn how to create in this tutorial

Table of Contents

Additionally, as you create your presentation, you’ll also learn tricks for working more efficiently in PowerPoint, including how to:

  • Change the slide order
  • Reset your layout
  • Change the slide dimensions
  • Use PowerPoint Designer
  • Format text
  • Format objects
  • Play a presentation (slide show)

With this knowledge under your belt, you’ll be ready to start creating PowerPoint presentations. Moreover, you’ll have taken your skills from beginner to proficient in no time at all. I will also include links to more advanced PowerPoint topics.

Ready to start learning how to make a PowerPoint presentation?

Take your PPT skills to the next level

Start with a blank presentation.

Note: Before you open PowerPoint and start creating your presentation, make sure you’ve collected your thoughts. If you’re going to make your slides compelling, you need to spend some time brainstorming.

For help with this, see our article with tips for nailing your business presentation  here .

The first thing you’ll need to do is to open PowerPoint. When you do, you are shown the Start Menu , with the Home tab open.

This is where you can choose either a blank theme (1) or a pre-built theme (2). You can also choose to open an existing presentation (3).

For now, go ahead and click on the  Blank Presentation (1)  thumbnail.

In the backstage view of PowerPoint you can create a new blank presentation, use a template, or open a recent file

Doing so launches a brand new and blank presentation for you to work with. Before you start adding content to your presentation, let’s first familiarize ourselves with the PowerPoint interface.

The PowerPoint interface

Picture of the different parts of the PowerPoint layout, including the Ribbon, thumbnail view, quick access toolbar, notes pane, etc.

Here is how the program is laid out:

  • The Application Header
  • The Ribbon (including the Ribbon tabs)
  • The Quick Access Toolbar (either above or below the Ribbon)
  • The Slides Pane (slide thumbnails)

The Slide Area

The notes pane.

  • The Status Bar (including the View Buttons)

Each one of these areas has options for viewing certain parts of the PowerPoint environment and formatting your presentation.

Below are the important things to know about certain elements of the PowerPoint interface.

The PowerPoint Ribbon

The PowerPoint Ribbon in the Microsoft Office Suite

The Ribbon is contextual. That means that it will adapt to what you’re doing in the program.

For example, the Font, Paragraph and Drawing options are greyed out until you select something that has text in it, as in the example below (A).

Example of the Shape Format tab in PowerPoint and all of the subsequent commands assoicated with that tab

Furthermore, if you start manipulating certain objects, the Ribbon will display additional tabs, as seen above (B), with more commands and features to help you work with those objects. The following objects have their own additional tabs in the Ribbon which are hidden until you select them:

  • Online Pictures
  • Screenshots
  • Screen Recording

The Slides Pane

The slides pane in PowerPoint is on the left side of your workspace

This is where you can preview and rearrange all the slides in your presentation.

Right-clicking on a slide  in the pane gives you additional options on the slide level that you won’t find on the Ribbon, such as  Duplicate Slide ,  Delete Slide , and  Hide Slide .

Right clicking a PowerPoint slide in the thumbnail view gives you a variety of options like adding new slides, adding sections, changing the layout, etc.

In addition, you can add sections to your presentation by  right-clicking anywhere in this Pane  and selecting  Add Section . Sections are extremely helpful in large presentations, as they allow you to organize your slides into chunks that you can then rearrange, print or display differently from other slides.

Content added to your PowerPoint slides will only display if it's on the slide area, marked here by the letter A

The Slide Area (A) is where you will build out your slides. Anything within the bounds of this area will be visible when you present or print your presentation.

Anything outside of this area (B) will be hidden from view. This means that you can place things here, such as instructions for each slide, without worrying about them being shown to your audience.

The notes pane in PowerPoint is located at the bottom of your screen and is where you can type your speaker notes

The  Notes Pane  is the space beneath the Slide Area where you can type in the speaker notes for each slide. It’s designed as a fast way to add and edit your slides’ talking points.

To expand your knowledge and learn more about adding, printing, and exporting your PowerPoint speaker notes, read our guide here .

Your speaker notes are visible when you print your slides using the Notes Pages option and when you use the Presenter View . To expand your knowledge and learn the ins and outs of using the Presenter View , read our guide here .

You can click and drag to resize the notes pane at the bottom of your PowerPoint screen

You can resize the  Notes Pane  by clicking on its edge and dragging it up or down (A). You can also minimize or reopen it by clicking on the Notes button in the Status Bar (B).

Note:  Not all text formatting displays in the Notes Pane, even though it will show up when printing your speaker notes. To learn more about printing PowerPoint with notes, read our guide here .

Now that you have a basic grasp of the PowerPoint interface at your disposal, it’s time to make your presentation.

Adding Content to Your PowerPoint Presentation

Notice that in the Slide Area , there are two rectangles with dotted outlines. These are called  Placeholders  and they’re set on the template in the Slide Master View .

To expand your knowledge and learn how to create a PowerPoint template of your own (which is no small task), read our guide here .

Click into your content placeholders and start typing text, just as the prompt suggests

As the prompt text suggests, you can click into each placeholder and start typing text. These types of placeholder prompts are customizable too. That means that if you are using a company template, it might say something different, but the functionality is the same.

Example of typing text into a content placeholder in PowerPoint

Note:  For the purposes of this example, I will create a presentation based on the content in the Starbucks 2018 Global Social Impact Report, which is available to the public on their website.

If you type in more text than there is room for, PowerPoint will automatically reduce its font size. You can stop this behavior by clicking on the  Autofit Options  icon to the left of the placeholder and selecting  Stop Fitting Text to this Placeholder .

Next, you can make formatting adjustments to your text by selecting the commands in the Font area and the  Paragraph area  of the  Home  tab of the Ribbon.

Use the formatting options on the Home tab to choose the formatting of your text

The Reset Command:  If you make any changes to your title and decide you want to go back to how it was originally, you can use the Reset button up in the Home tab .

Hitting the reset command on the home tab resets your slide formatting to match your template

Insert More Slides into Your Presentation

Now that you have your title slide filled in, it’s time to add more slides. To do that, simply go up to the  Home tab  and click on  New Slide . This inserts a new slide in your presentation right after the one you were on.

To insert a new slide in PowerPoint, on the home tab click the New Slide command

You can alternatively hit Ctrl+M on your keyboard to insert a new blank slide in PowerPoint. To learn more about this shortcut, see my guide on using Ctrl+M in PowerPoint .

Instead of clicking the New Slide command, you can also open the New Slide dropdown to see all the slide layouts in your PowerPoint template. Depending on who created your template, your layouts in this dropdown can be radically different.

Opening the new slide dropdown you can see all the slide layouts in your PowerPoint template

If you insert a layout and later want to change it to a different layout, you can use the Layout dropdown instead of the New Slide dropdown.

After inserting a few different slide layouts, your presentation might look like the following picture. Don’t worry that it looks blank, next we will start adding content to your presentation.

Example of a number of different blank slide layouts inserting in a PowerPoint presentation

If you want to follow along exactly with me, your five slides should be as follows:

  • Title Slide
  • Title and Content
  • Section Header
  • Two Content
  • Picture with Caption

Adding Content to Your Slides

Now let’s go into each slide and start adding our content. You’ll notice some new types of placeholders.

Use the icons within a content placeholder to insert things like tables, charts, SmartArt, Pictures, etc.

On slide 2 we have a  Content Placeholder , which allows you to add any kind of content. That includes:

  • A SmartArt graphic,
  • A 3D object,
  • A picture from the web,
  • Or an icon.

To insert text, simply type it in or hit  Ctrl+C to Copy  and Ctrl+V to Paste  from elsewhere. To insert any of the other objects, click on the appropriate icon and follow the steps to insert it.

For my example, I’ll simply type in some text as you can see in the picture below.

Example typing bulleted text in a content placeholder in PowerPoint

Slides 3 and 4 only have text placeholders, so I’ll go ahead and add in my text into each one.

Examples of text typed into a divider slide and a title and content slide in PowerPoint

On slide 5 we have a Picture Placeholder . That means that the only elements that can go into it are:

  • A picture from the web

A picture placeholder in PowerPoint can only take an image or an icon

To insert a picture into the picture placeholder, simply:

  • Click on the  Picture  icon
  • Find  a picture on your computer and select it
  • Click on  Insert

Alternatively, if you already have a picture open somewhere else, you can select the placeholder and paste in (shortcut: Ctrl+V ) the picture. You can also drag the picture in from a file explorer window.

To insert a picture into a picture placeholder, click the picture icon, find your picture on your computer and click insert

If you do not like the background of the picture you inserted onto your slide, you can remove the background here in PowerPoint. To see how to do this, read my guide here .

Placeholders aren’t the only way to add content to your slides. At any point, you can use the Insert tab to add elements to your slides.

You can use either the Title Only  or the  Blank  slide layout to create slides for content that’s different. For example, a three-layout content slide, or a single picture divider slide, as shown below.

Example slides using PowerPoint icons and background pictures

In the first example above, I’ve inserted 6 text boxes, 3 icons, and 3 circles to create this layout. In the second example, I’ve inserted a full-sized picture and then 2 shapes and 2 text boxes.

The Reset Command:  Because these slides are built with shapes and text boxes (and not placeholders), hitting the  Reset button up in the  Home tab  won’t do anything.

That is a good thing if you don’t want your layouts to adjust. However, it does mean that it falls on you to make sure everything is aligned and positioned correctly.

For more on how to add and manipulate the different objects in PowerPoint, check out our step-by-step articles here:

  • Using graphics in PowerPoint
  • Inserting icons onto slides
  • Adding pictures to your PowerPoint
  • How to embed a video in PowerPoint
  • How to add music to your presentation

Using Designer to generate more layouts ideas

If you have Office 365, your version of PowerPoint comes with a new feature called Designer (or Design Ideas). This is a feature that generates slide layout ideas for you. The coolest thing about this feature is that it uses the content you already have.

To use Designer , simply navigate to the  Design tab  in your Ribbon, and click on  Design Ideas .

To use Designer on your slides, click the

NOTE: If the PowerPoint Designer is not working for you (it is grey out), see my troubleshooting guide for Designer .

Change the Overall Design (optional)

When you make a PowerPoint presentation, you’ll want to think about the overall design. Now that you have some content in your presentation, you can use the Design tab to change the look and feel of your slides.

For additional help thinking through the design of your presentation,  read my guide here .

A. Picking your PowerPoint slide size

If you have PowerPoint 2013 or later, when you create a blank document in PowerPoint, you automatically start with a widescreen layout with a 16:9 ratio. These dimensions are suitable for most presentations as they match the screens of most computers and projectors.

However, you do have the option to change the dimensions.

For example, your presentation might not be presented, but instead converted into a PDF or printed and distributed. In that case, you can easily switch to the standard dimensions with a 4:3 ratio by selecting from the dropdown (A).

You can also choose a custom slide size or change the slide orientation from landscape to portrait in the Custom Slide Size dialog box (B).

To change your slide size, click the Design tab, open the slide size dropdown and choose a size or custom slide size

To learn all about the different PowerPoint slide sizes, and some of the issues you will face when changing the slide size of a non-blank presentation,  read my guide here .

 B. Selecting a PowerPoint theme

The next thing you can do is change the theme of your presentation to a pre-built one. For a detailed explanation of what a PowerPoint theme is, and how to best use it,  read my article here .

In the beginning of this tutorial, we started with a blank presentation, which uses the default Office theme as you can see in the picture below.

All PowerPoint presentations start with the default Microsoft Office theme

That gives you the most flexibility because it has a blank background and quite simple layouts that work for most presentations. However, it also means that it’s your responsibility to enhance the design.

If you’re comfortable with this, you can stay with the default theme or create your own custom theme ( read my guide here ). But if you would rather not have to think about design, then you can choose a pre-designed theme.

Microsoft provides 46 other pre-built themes, which include slide layouts, color variants and palettes, and fonts. Each one varies quite significantly, so make sure you look through them carefully.

To select a different theme, go to the  Design tab  in the Ribbon, and click on the  dropdown arrow  in the  Themes section .

On the Design tab you will find all of the default PowerPoint templates that come with the Microsoft Office Suite

For this tutorial, let’s select the  Frame  theme and then choose the third Variant in the theme. Doing so changes the layout, colors, and fonts of your presentation.

Example choosing the Frame PowerPoint theme and the third variant of this powerpoint presentation

Note: The theme dropdown area is also where you can import or save custom themes. To see my favorite places to find professional PowerPoint templates and themes (and recommendations for why I like them), read my guide here .

C. How to change a slide background in PowerPoint

The next thing to decide is how you want your background to look for the entire presentation. In the  Variants area, you can see four background options.

To change the background style of your presentation, on the Design tab, find the Background Styles options and choose a style

For this example, we want our presentation to have a dark background, so let’s select Style 3. When you do so, you’ll notice that:

  • The background color automatically changes across all slides
  • The color of the text on most of the slides automatically changes to white so that it’s visible on the dark background
  • The colors of the objects on slides #6 and #7 also adjust, in a way we may not want (we’ll likely have to make some manual adjustments to these slides)

What our PowerPoint presentation looks like now that we have selected a theme, a variant, and a background style

Note: If you want to change the slide background for just that one slide, don’t left-click the style. Instead, right-click it and select Apply to Selected Slides .

After you change the background for your entire presentation, you can easily adjust the background for an individual slide.

You can either right-click a PowerPoint slide and select format background or navigate to the design tab and click the format background command

Inside the Format Background pane, you can see you have the following options:

  • Gradient fill
  • Picture or texture fill
  • Pattern fill
  • Hide background

You can explore these options to find the PowerPoint background that best fits your presentation.

D. How to change your color palette in PowerPoint

Another thing you may want to adjust in your presentation, is the color scheme. In the picture below you can see the Theme Colors we are currently using for this presentation.

Example of the theme colors we are currently using with this presentation

Each PowerPoint theme comes with its own color palette. By default, the Office theme includes the Office color palette. This affects the colors you are presented with when you format any element within your presentation (text, shapes, SmartArt, etc.).

To change the theme color for your presentation, select the Design tab, open the Colors options and choose the colors you want to use

The good news is that the colors here are easy to change. To switch color palettes, simply:

  • Go to the  Design tab in the Ribbon
  • In the Variants area, click on the  dropdown arrow  and select  Colors
  • Select  the color palette (or theme colors) you want

You can choose among the pre-built color palettes from Office, or you can customize them to create your own.

As you build your presentation, make sure you use the colors from your theme to format objects. That way, changing the color palette adjusts all the colors in your presentation automatically.

E. How to change your fonts in PowerPoint

Just as we changed the color palette, you can do the same for the fonts.

Example of custom theme fonts that might come with a powerpoint template

Each PowerPoint theme comes with its own font combination. By default, the Office theme includes the Office font pairing. This affects the fonts that are automatically assigned to all text in your presentation.

To change the default fonts for your presentation, from the design tab, find the fonts dropdown and select the pair of fonts you want to use

The good news is that the font pairings are easy to change. To switch your Theme Fonts, simply:

  • Go to the  Design tab  in the Ribbon
  • Click on the  dropdown arrow  in the  Variants  area
  • Select  Fonts
  • Select  the font pairing you want

You can choose among the pre-built fonts from Office, or you can customize them to create your own.

If you are working with PowerPoint presentations on both Mac and PC computers, make sure you choose a safe PowerPoint font. To see a list of the safest PowerPoint fonts, read our guide here .

If you receive a PowerPoint presentation and the wrong fonts were used, you can use the Replace Fonts dialog box to change the fonts across your entire presentation. For details, read our guide here .

Adding Animations & Transitions (optional)

The final step to make a PowerPoint presentation compelling, is to consider using animations and transitions. These are by no means necessary to a good presentation, but they may be helpful in your situation.

A. Adding PowerPoint animations

PowerPoint has an incredibly robust animations engine designed to power your creativity. That being said, it’s also easy to get started with basic animations.

Animations are movements that you can apply to individual objects on your slide.

To add an animation to an object in PowerPoint, first select the object and then use the Animations tab to select an animation type

To add a PowerPoint animation to an element of your slide, simply:

  • Select the  element
  • Go to the  Animations tab in the Ribbon
  • Click on the  dropdown arrow  to view your options
  • Select the  animation  you want

You can add animations to multiple objects at one time by selecting them all first and then applying the animation.

B. How to preview a PowerPoint animation

There are three ways to preview a PowerPoint animation

There are three ways to preview a PowerPoint animation:

  • Click on the Preview button in the Animations tab
  • Click on the little star  next to the slide
  • Play the slide in Slide Show Mode

To learn other ways to run your slide show, see our guide on presenting a PowerPoint slide show with shortcuts .

To adjust the settings of your animations, explore the options in the  Effect Options ,  Advanced Animation  and the  Timing  areas of the  Animation tab .

The Animations tab allows you to adjust the effects and timings of your animations in PowerPoint

Note:  To see how to make objects appear and disappear in your slides by clicking a button,  read our guide here .

C. How to manage your animations in PowerPoint

You can see the animations applied to your objects by the little numbers in the upper right-hand corner of the objects

The best way to manage lots of animations on your slide is with the Animation Pane . To open it, simply:

  • Navigate to the  Animations tab
  • Select the  Animation Pane

Inside the Animation Pane, you’ll see all of the different animations that have been applied to objects on your slide, with their numbers marked as pictured above.

Note: To see examples of PowerPoint animations that can use in PowerPoint, see our list of PowerPoint animation tutorials here .

D. How to add transitions to your PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint has an incredibly robust transition engine so that you can dictate how your slides change from one to the other. It is also extremely easy to add transitions to your slides.

In PowerPoint, transitions are the movements (or effects) you see as you move between two slides.

To add a transition to a slide, select the slide, navigate to the transitions tab in PowerPoint and select your transition

To add a transition to a PowerPoint slide, simply:

  • Select the  slide
  • Go to the  Transitions tab in the Ribbon
  • In the Transitions to This Slide area, click on the  dropdown arrow  to view your options
  • Select the  transition  you want

To adjust the settings of the transition, explore the options in the  Timing  area of the Transitions tab.

You can also add the same transition to multiple slides. To do that, select them in the  Slides Pane  and apply the transition.

E. How to preview a transition in PowerPoint

There are three ways to preview a transition in PowerPoint

There are three ways to preview your PowerPoint transitions (just like your animations):

  • Click on the Preview  button in the Transitions tab
  • Click on the little star  beneath the slide number in the thumbnail view

Note:  In 2016, PowerPoint added a cool new transition, called Morph. It operates a bit differently from other transitions. For a detailed tutorial on how to use the cool Morph transition,  see our step-by-step article here .

Save Your PowerPoint Presentation

After you’ve built your presentation and made all the adjustments to your slides, you’ll want to save your presentation. YOu can do this several different ways.

Click the file tab, select Save As, choose where you want to save your presentation and then click save

To save a PowerPoint presentation using your Ribbon, simply:

  • Navigate to the  File tab
  •  Select  Save As  on the left
  • Choose  where you want to save your presentation
  • Name  your presentation and/or adjust your file type settings
  • Click  Save

You can alternatively use the  Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut to save your presentation. I recommend using this shortcut frequently as you build your presentation to make sure you don’t lose any of your work.

The save shortcut is control plus s in PowerPoint

This is the standard way to save a presentation. However, there may be a situation where you want to save your presentation as a different file type.

To learn how to save your presentation as a PDF, see our guide on converting PowerPoint to a PDF .

How to save your PowerPoint presentation as a template

Once you’ve created a presentation that you like, you may want to turn it into a template. The easiest – but not technically correct – way, is to simply create a copy of your current presentation and then change the content.

But be careful! A PowerPoint template is a special type of document and it has its own parameters and behaviors.

If you’re interested in learning about how to create your own PowerPoint template from scratch, see our guide on how to create a PowerPoint template .

Printing Your PowerPoint Presentation

After finishing your PowerPoint presentation, you may want to print it out on paper. Printing your slides is relatively easy.

The print shortcut is control plus P in PowerPoint

To open the Print dialog box, you can either:

  • Hit Ctrl+P on your keyboard
  • Or go to the Ribbon and click on File and then Print

In the Print dialog box, make your selections for how you want to print your PowerPoint presentation, then click print

Inside the Print dialog box, you can choose from the various printing settings:

  • Printer: Select a printer to use (or print to PDF or OneNote)
  • Slides: Choose which slides you want to print
  • Layout: Determine how many slides you want per page (this is where you can print the notes, outline, and handouts)
  • Collated or uncollated (learn what collated printing means here )
  • Color: Choose to print in color, grayscale or black & white

There are many more options for printing your PowerPoint presentations. Here are links to more in-depth articles:

  • How to print multiple slides per page
  • How to print your speaker notes in PowerPoint
  • How to save PowerPoint as a picture presentation

So that’s how to create a PowerPoint presentation if you are brand new to it. We’ve also included a ton of links to helpful resources to boost your PowerPoint skills further.

When you are creating your presentation, it is critical to first focus on the content (what you are trying to say) before getting lost inserting and playing with elements. The clearer you are on what you want to present, the easier it will be to build it out in PowerPoint.

If you enjoyed this article, you can learn more about our PowerPoint training courses and other presentation resources by  visiting us here .

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Creating more immersive presentations in Google Slides

What’s changing.

speaker-spotlight in slides

Who’s impacted 

Why it’s important , getting started .

  • Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. 
  • End users: To add the spotlight shape into Slides, go to Insert > speaker spotlight or click the speaker spotlight button in the toolbar. Visit the Help Center to learn more about using speaker spotlight .  

Rollout pace 

  • Rapid Release domains : Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on February 15, 2024 
  • Scheduled Release domains : Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on March 6, 2024 

Availability 

  • Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Essentials Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, and Education Plus 

Resources 

  • Google Help: Use speaker spotlight

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5 golden rules of PowerPoint design

february 6, 2024

A smiling woman with blonde hair, glasses, and a leopard print cardigan poses with her hands on her hips in front of an olive green background.

by Deb Ashby

Wondering how to design the perfect PowerPoint presentation? It's easier than you think–just follow five simple rules to get started:

1. Consider using templates

When building a slide deck, it’s important to maintain consistency throughout. We want to ensure we are using consistent font styles, colors and themes. This can be tricky when designing from scratch, so why not start from a template?

Microsoft Create contains hundreds of pre-made, customizable PowerPoint templates, which means you don’t have to start from scratch and the fonts and colors are already set for you.

Simply choose a template from the gallery, customize it as needed, and you are done!

Screenshots of slides in a branded PowerPoint presentation, in hues of navy, maroon, and brown.

2. No walls of text

We’ve all seen PowerPoint presentations where slides contain too much text. The human brain struggles to listen and read at the same time. If you are presenting to an audience, keep the text on slides to a minimum.

Consider employing the “5-5-5" rule. No more than 5 lines, no more than 5 words, no more than 5 minutes. Think short and sharp memory joggers instead of rambling paragraphs.

Where possible, consider replacing text with visuals to represent your point. People remember images more than words.

A minimalist, black and white PowerPoint template

3. Be mindful of colors and fonts

No one wants their audience to leave with a headache after an hour of straining to read slides. We need to ensure that our presentation is easy to read for everyone – even for those in the nosebleed seats at the back! Think about the font you are using. Is it appropriate for the presentation? What about the font size? Can people at the back easily read? What about people with visual impairment? Ensure all text is at least 24pts.

When it comes to color, ensure all slides have good contrast. Dark backgrounds should have light font and vice versa.

4. Use animation sparingly

Animation can really liven up an otherwise flat presentation. However, it should be used thoughtfully and sparingly. Too much of the wrong type of animation with objects flying in and zooming around the screen, while fun, can look confusing and unprofessional.

Animation should be subtle. With every animation you add, ask yourself, "Is this going to enhance my presentation or distract from it?"

5. Engage your audience

When presenting to an audience, there is usually an awkward time before the presentation begins while the speaker waits for everyone to arrive. During this time, people may start scrolling on their phones or get distracted with work emails, and it can be hard to pull the audience back.

To avoid this issue, work to grab your audience's attention before the presentation even starts. Instead of just having the title slide on the screen, consider creating "kiosk slides." These are a series of slides that contain a combination of interesting things for the audience to look at or engage with. Maybe you have an interesting image? A funny quote or fun facts? Or maybe there is a question you want them to think about prior to the session?

Create these slides and have them automatically cycle round before the presentation starts.

A PowerPoint presentation for a whitepaper proposal.

Related topics

Don't start your work presentations by simply saying 'hello.' Here's how to be more engaging in the conference room.

  • I'm a public-speaking expert, and I've trained many executives and senior teams.
  • I tell all of them to stop starting work presentations with a salutation or a "hello."
  • Instead, you should engage your audience by telling a story or asking a question.

Insider Today

I'm sure you've sat through plenty of presentations where the presenter starts with a polite salutation like, "Hello, thank you for having me here today," or, "I am so glad to be here" — often followed by their name and professional résumé . Sometimes, if it's an internal meeting, you get the same salutations followed by an agenda slide with bullet points and the presenter narrating it.

As a public-speaking coach who has worked with many executives and senior teams, I know how to make work presentations more engaging. Here's how you should change your approach.

If you stick to your old ways, you aren't leaving a memorable first impression

Your audience is thinking three things when you walk into that conference room or onto that stage: Who is this person, why should I care, and how are they going to solve my problem?

Let's face it: Most people are more interested in how you will solve their problem than in you and your professional résumé. So let's flip the script a bit. Start with the solution to their problem, briefly talk about yourself for credibility, and then give them a reason to care.

Instead, try to capture their attention

Begin your presentation with a hook or a story — something that grabs their attention right from the start. For instance, your hook might be, "Did you know this?" or "What if that?" It could also be a short story that humanizes your services or products.

Most presentations are predictable; wouldn't it be better for both your time and your audience if you could introduce an element of surprise?

Some might feel it rude not to thank the organizer or greet the audience, so I suggest finding another place in your presentation for this. Here's a good structure:

Intro: "What if you could be a more confident and credible presenter? What if you could engage with your audience so they remember your products or services?"

Credibility: "My name is Meridith, and I've been coaching entrepreneurs and executives on how to speak with spark for over a decade, and I am really excited to be here. I want to thank [insert name] for inviting me to share the afternoon with you."

Solution: "Today, I will give you three ways to make your audience remember your products and services, helping you stand out in a competitive market. Let's get this party started!"

You could also try to form a personal connection

Often, presentations lack a personal touch. Try sharing a relevant personal anecdote or experience that relates to your topic. This not only makes your work presentation more relatable but also helps to establish a deeper connection with your audience.

For example, you could say: "When I was younger, I often hid in the back of the classroom, hoping the teacher wouldn't call on me because I didn't want to sound stupid or have the wrong answer. Later in life, I discovered acting and improv comedy . It was through the practice of these two art forms that I developed my confidence and learned how to engage more courageously with others. Today, I will give you solutions for how you can also better engage your audience with spark."

Try to encourage interaction

At the very least, you should try to engage your audience from the beginning — whether in person or on virtual calls. You can ask a thought-provoking question or propose a challenge that involves them directly. This approach shifts the dynamic to more interactive and engaging sessions.

If you implement any of these suggestions, you can make your presentation memorable and impactful immediately. And you'll most likely get a larger return on your investment of time and energy.

In today's fast-paced world, where attention spans are increasingly shorter than ever, it's crucial to grab and hold your audience's attention from the very beginning. By doing so, you set the stage for a more engaging and productive interaction. So challenge yourself to break free from presentation norms and embrace a style that resonates deeply with your audience and leaves a lasting impression.

creating learning presentations

Watch: A public speaking champion reveals 3 keys to nailing your business presentation

creating learning presentations

  • Main content

Spark & Sustain: How all of the world’s school systems can improve learning at scale

It is more important today than ever before to improve the quality and equity of education systems around the world. Automation is expected to increase demand for highly educated workers, creating a greater need for technological, socioemotional, and cognitive skills. The rise of generative AI is accelerating these workforce transitions. In addition to preparing students for the workforce, education systems are increasingly being asked to participate in resolving broader societal issues, from rising mental health challenges among young people 1 “Education: Overview,” World Bank, updated October 11, 2023. to political polarization 2 Sarah Garland, “Can we teach our way out of political polarization?,” Hechinger Report , January 25, 2021. to combating climate change. 3 “Climate change education,” UNESCO, accessed January 4, 2024.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Jake Bryant , Felipe Child , Ezgi Demirdag, Emma Dorn , Stephen Hall , Kartik Jayaram , Charag Krishnan , Cheryl Lim , Emmy Liss, Kemi Onabanjo, Frédéric Panier, Juan Rebolledo, Jimmy Sarakatsannis , Doug Scott, Roman Tschupp, Seckin Ungur , and Pierre Vigin, representing views from McKinsey’s global Education Practice.

Student learning improvements are not keeping up with these demands. More children than ever are in school, but many are not mastering basic skills. The World Bank estimates that seven in ten students in low- and middle-income countries are living in “learning poverty,” unable to read a simple text by the end of elementary school. The same is true for nearly nine in ten students in sub-Saharan Africa. This means that the majority of the world’s children are born into education systems where they will not learn to read by the end of elementary school. 4 “70% of 10-year-olds now in learning poverty, unable to read and understand a simple text,” World Bank, June 23, 2022.

More children than ever are in school, but many are not mastering basic skills.

Much of the global discussion about educational performance revolves around a small subset of mostly high-income countries that get relatively high scores on the three major assessments: the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). In our schema below, we classify those countries as having “good” or “great” performance.

However, more than 90 percent of children live in countries where average educational outcomes are below poor, poor, or fair. 5 Based on UNESCO population data of countries with World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcome (HLO) data. Historically, many of these countries have not taken international assessments, but more recently, the introduction of regional assessments 6 Relevant regional assessments include the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ), Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems (PASEC), and Latin American Laboratory for the Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE). and the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) has enabled a broader global comparison of learning outcomes. The OECD suggests that approximately 20 PISA points are equivalent to a year of learning. By that measure, high school students in many sub-Saharan African countries may be ten or more years behind their peers in Europe, North America, or East Asia (Exhibit 1). 7 The translation of PISA points to a year of learning is an art, not a science. The latest analysis from the OECD suggests that approximately 20 PISA points reflect a year of learning, while the World Bank suggests a year of learning equates to 20 to 50 PISA points. There is likely some variation depending on a student’s age; typically, students in earlier grades learn more content in a single year than students in later grades.

In the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, student performance in most school systems globally stagnated—or declined. Of the 73 countries with longitudinal data over the past decade, only 23 managed to achieve significant, sustained, and consistent improvements in student outcomes. In 17 systems, student performance declined by half a year of learning or more. 8 Countries are categorized as “improved” if they gained ten points on two subject tests across PISA math, PISA reading, PISA science, PIRLS reading, TIMSS math, and TIMSS science in the past decade and if they improved by ten points or more on average across tests. Countries are categorized as “declined” if they lost ten points on two subject tests in the past decade. Countries are categorized as “stagnated” if they are not categorized as “improved” or “declined.” Some of these categorized as stagnated had stable performance; others had differing performance across different tests. Countries are excluded from the analysis if they lack enough evidence (for example, if they have not taken two international tests with a decade’s worth of data). Systems that historically performed at the highest levels were most likely to experience declines (Exhibit 2). Even in high-performing countries, overall system performance may mask significant inequities; every system that participates in PISA shows gaps in performance correlated with socioeconomic status.

In the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, student performance in most school systems globally stagnated—or declined.

The pandemic only exacerbated these challenges. Lost learning time widened equity gaps within and between countries, with students ending up, on average, eight months behind where they would have been absent the pandemic. Meanwhile, the pandemic’s shift to remote work and e-commerce accelerated changes in the workforce. This is creating a scissor effect: learning losses are colliding with an increasing need for higher-order skills.

The stakes are high: if historical trends continue, more than 700 million children will remain in learning poverty in 2050. The pandemic wiped out decades of educational improvements, and we cannot wait decades to make up these losses. The world’s population is growing fastest in the places where learning is the furthest behind. 9 Population growth is projected to be significant in many low- and middle-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (for example, 43 percent projected population growth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2019 to 2030), but flat or negative in many higher-income countries (for example, 1 percent projected population decline in Canada over the same period). “Population estimates and projections,” World Bank, updated December 20, 2023. If we do nothing, the implications for economic growth and political stability worldwide will be tremendous. However, this grim future is not inevitable. If all systems could improve student outcomes at the rate of the top improvers, an additional 350 million students could be lifted out of learning poverty in the next 30 years (Exhibit 3). This report considers what it would take to make that happen.

Systems beating the odds

At first glance, the lack of progress may seem puzzling. Over the past decades, the education community has researched, developed, and codified strong evidence on what students need to master foundational skills such as reading, writing, and critical thinking. We know what interventions work to move most students to proficiency. Over the past decade, per-capita education spending has increased in countries of all income levels. 10 Education Finance Watch 2023 , a joint report from the World Bank, the Global Education Monitoring Report, and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2023. And yet our global survey of 400 education leaders globally found that only 20 percent of education improvement efforts meet their stated goals (Exhibit 4).

To understand how school systems globally can reignite growth and recover from the learning losses of the pandemic, McKinsey examined the decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted research across both improving and declining school systems; analyzed global data; and spoke with more than 200 system leaders, donors and philanthropists, not-for-profit leaders, academics, and educational consultants.

Our interviews all pointed to the complexity of the implementation challenge. Most school systems struggle to turn improvements into action at scale. Our research demonstrates that to make changes stick, it is not enough for leaders to know “what” interventions to use. It also requires understanding “how” to implement them well at scale. In many systems, well-intentioned changes fizzle out. Stagnating school systems tend to get stuck in a few “failure modes”:

  • Conflicting directions. Education is not seen as a priority, resulting in an inability to raise the donor or domestic funds needed to deliver. Goals are too numerous, too far out in the future, and hard to measure, and there is a lack of coherence across the individual elements of reform.
  • Leadership discontinuity. Educational change requires more time than politics often allows. Rapid electoral cycles and short tenures for ministers of education can lead to a whipsaw of priorities, which can in turn confuse and disillusion educators and families. This is exacerbated when reform efforts are tied to political structures, rather than more deeply embedded within institutions.
  • Organ rejection of reform. Improvements may falter in the face of pushback from communities and educators who feel they were not consulted. Top-down policies may not actually work once they reach the classroom.
  • Insufficient coordination and pace of change. Too much time is spent on developing strategy and not enough on creating an implementation road map with aligned budgets, timelines, and accountability.
  • Limited implementation capacity. A lack of program management and analytical capacity within government undermines reform efforts—great educators do not always make great managers. Donor technical assistance ends up overly dependent on international consultants, who leave, rather than local players.
  • Flying blind. Leaders at all levels operate without sufficient data, missing key opportunities to create transparency and to intervene.
  • Standing still. Systems try to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. Leaders may pilot new ideas but without a plan for how to measure impact and take them to scale.

Yet failure is not inevitable. The good news is that some systems are beating the odds and producing meaningful gains in student learning year after year. These outlier school systems exist on every continent and at every level of national development. The global education community can chart a new path by learning from these systems.

To identify improving systems, we looked at national systems that had achieved sustained, consistent, and significant improvements in student outcomes as measured by international assessments, 11 This included PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS. as well as at lower-income systems with emerging evidence of improvement on regional assessments. 12 Relevant regional assessments include SACMEQ, PASEC, and LLECE. We also identified relevant subnational improvers using national assessment data. 13 This included the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in India, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the United States, the National Achievement Survey (NAS) in India, Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica (SAEB) in Brazil, and the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in England. None of the 14 systems that we profiled is perfect, and in some, the absolute level of achievement is still low, but each has meaningful lessons to impart at different stages of the educational improvement journey from below poor to poor to fair to good to great (Exhibit 5). 14 Some of these systems faltered in more recent assessments, including the 2021 PIRLS and 2022 PISA administrations, though we believe these results are largely a reflection of recent global crises. Because of that, our historical analysis is based on the decade preceding the pandemic.

Some systems are beating the odds and producing meaningful gains in student learning year after year.

Our analysis suggests that successful systems, at every level of spending and national development, use reinforcing strategies to create a virtuous cycle, enabling significant, long-term gains in student learning (Exhibit 6):

  • Anchor in the evidence. Based on clear research into what improves outcomes, successful school systems ground changes in the classroom, focusing first and foremost on teachers and the content they deliver. They choose evidence-backed strategies relevant to their starting place and prioritize foundational learning, particularly in systems with limited resources. They use technology as a tool to enhance learning, not as an end in itself.
  • Build a durable coalition for change. Successful school systems focus on a few coherent priorities, rallying stakeholders around them to ensure that everyone—from system leadership to principals to teachers—is on board. They invest in authentic, two-way communication with families, educators, and communities to design better policies and build deeper buy-in.
  • Create delivery capacity to scale. Successful systems move quickly from strategy to implementation, pacing reforms to show early traction while building stamina for the long road to impact. They build dedicated delivery teams with the organizational structures and individual skills to execute on plans over time.
  • Drive and adapt with data. Successful systems rigorously measure what matters—student learning outcomes—and use transparent data to improve their interventions. As they roll out tried-and-true methods, they also create space for innovation and measure what they innovate, which feeds back into the evidence base of what works.

Individually, these strategies may seem obvious or incremental. Together, they are transformative. Our survey suggests that systems that used all seven of the “how” levers above were six times more likely to be successful in meeting their goals for student outcomes and system transformation than those that used four or fewer (Exhibit 7).

Anchor in the evidence

Ground system strategy in better classroom instruction. The global education community knows what strategies drive learning outcomes. Successful systems focus on interventions closest to students and work outward, starting with the classroom (what is taught, how it is taught), then the school (what supports exist for students and teachers), and finally aligning the system supports (performance management, infrastructure, funding) to what is needed in the classroom (Exhibit 8).

For example, Singapore invests heavily in its instructional core throughout the curriculum and across teacher recruitment, development, and retention. Teacher candidates are drawn from the top 30 percent of their graduating class and must demonstrate core content knowledge. Once in the system, teachers complete 100 hours of professional development annually and receive coaching and weekly collaborative sessions with master and senior teachers. Professional development is practical and tailored, offered in digestible modules, and delivered in classrooms. 15 Singapore: A teaching model for the 21st century , Center on International Education Benchmarking, 2016.

In Poland, reforms in the early 2000s focused on redesigning the national curriculum—first in elementary grades and later in secondary schools—and on investments at the teacher, principal, and school level to reinforce adoption. Based on research about learning and comprehension, the curriculum was redesigned to prioritize critical thinking and reasoning where there had previously been a content overload. Teachers were engaged in the redesign to inform what strategies might lead to the best uptake; expert coaches worked with teachers to build their skills around the new curriculum. 16 Fernando M. Reimers, Audacious Education Purposes: How Governments Transform the Goals of Education Systems , New York, NY: Springer, 2020.

Start the journey where you are. To select the best interventions, school systems need to consider their starting student performance, their financial resources, and the capabilities of their teachers and school leaders. One of the biggest mistakes that school systems can make is to “lift and shift” best practices from a system that operates in a vastly different context. In our methodology, we group school systems into five performance bands, based on student learning levels: below poor, poor, fair, good, and great. While the elements of school system excellence remain the same, the interventions differ.

Education technology—great potential but mixed results

While education technology, including generative AI, has great potential to improve access and quality, it is not a silver bullet and can cause more harm than good if it becomes a distraction to proven, tried-and-true methods to deliver student outcomes. History is littered with examples of universal device and connectivity programs that did not yield improvements in student outcomes. Data from the 2022 Programme for International Assessment (PISA) questionnaire, which was issued with the assessment, creates additional reason for pause regarding the use of technology in schools, given that a arge number of students reported feeling distracted by devices while engaged in classroom instruction. While learning outcomes were often better for students who used devices in school for learning than for those who did not, the benefits were strongest for those who used their device for less than an hour a day; the impact decreased with additional use. Moreover, students who used devices at home for leisure for more than an hour a day saw a big decline in math performance. 1 Andreas Schleicher, PISA 2022 insights and interpretations , OECD, 2023.

Effective technology strategies start in the classroom—with an understanding of how technology will further student learning goals and provide support for teachers. They are focused on the ability of software to address specific use cases rather than just hardware distribution, are integrated into and aligned with the existing curriculum, involve significant professional learning and support for teachers, and consider putting technology in the hands of teachers rather than just students. Effective technology strategies are also tailored to journey and context—including existing infrastructure and existing teacher and principal capabilities.

As school systems progress toward good and great performance (for example, Poland and Singapore), increasing levels of school and teacher autonomy are possible, paired with effective accountability, capability building, and peer learning. Systems in the poor or below-poor performance bands (for example, Malawi and South Africa), by contrast, may be best advised to focus on foundational literacy and numeracy, ensure that instructional materials are available on a one-to-one basis, scaffold teachers through structured (or even scripted) lesson plans and in-situ coaching, and put effective assessment for instruction in place to account for greatly varying student achievement levels—a package of interventions sometimes referred to as structured pedagogy. Systems in the fair category (for example, Kenya) need to ensure the basics are in place, but they then can begin to expand selective earned autonomy, broader competency-based curricula tied to economic pathways, and incentives for teachers and school leaders to develop top talent (Exhibit 9). These imperatives to “start in the classroom” and “tailor to journey” apply equally to technology use (see sidebar, “Education technology—great potential but mixed results”).

For example, Ceará in Brazil, where performance was poor, prioritized Portuguese literacy and math in the curriculum, with a focus on elementary school, and invested heavily in supporting teachers to deliver quality content. All teachers received regular practical professional development, including classroom observations. The state government also led a long and sustainable journey to improve the quality of municipal education leaders, empowering them to provide better support for teachers and schools. From 2009 to 2019, Ceará registered an increase of nearly 12 percentage points on the National Assessment of Basic Education (Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica), moving from poor to fair. Ceará also saw the highest increase of any Brazilian state on the national index of educational quality in elementary education (Index of Development of Basic Education) between 2005 and 2017. 17 “The state of Ceara and the city of Sobral, in Brazil, are role models for reducing learning poverty,” World Bank, July 7, 2020.

In Punjab, India, where performance was below poor, leaders used Teaching at the Right Level to group students by level rather than age to reduce targeted learning gaps in primary school. Leaders used simple, quick one-on-one assessments to group students into levels at the start of the intervention, administered assessments throughout to track progress and adapt instruction based on students’ results, and reviewed aggregate data to make programmatic decisions. 18 Details of the Teaching at the Right Level implementation in Punjab are included in multiple years of the Pratham Foundation’s annual reports, accessed via the Pratham website. Teachers received training and support to change behaviors. While the share of students in India who could read a grade two text as measured by the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) declined from 2006 to 2014, the share in Punjab surpassed the national average and grew by 13.2 percentage points. 19 “Punjab rural: Trends over time: 2006-2014,” ASER, January 2015. Punjab moved from below poor to poor in the decade prior to the pandemic.

The journey is not perfectly linear for any system, and there are multiple paths to system improvement. In addition, in many systems, overall performance may mask inequities within the nation or region. In a single system, there can be schools ranging from below poor to great. This may require system leaders to consider a range of approaches to drive improvement based on schools’ starting points.

Build a durable coalition for change

Set fewer priorities to get more done. Education leaders are regularly pulled in too many directions. To counteract this, leaders of successful school systems define a North Star vision and choose a limited set of coherent, sustained, and evidence-based priorities (typically no more than three to six). They define these nonnegotiables based on the evidence of what works and ensure that donors and partners support this short list, channeling money and energy to what matters most.

For example, Mississippi reorganized its state education department and board to align their work against six core goals, started every meeting with a recap of these goals, and interrogated every new initiative against these priorities. 20 Emma Dorn, “ Behind the scenes of Mississippi’s school turnaround with Carey Wright ,” McKinsey, August 3, 2023. From 2010 to 2014, Kenya introduced 25 different interventions to address literacy rates and saw limited impact. 21 “Let’s Read: Understanding Kenya’s success in improving foundational literacy at scale,” RTI International, December 9, 2016. Starting in 2014, leaders pivoted and prioritized a singular evidence-based approach: Tusome. By relentlessly targeting the country’s low literacy rates through a proven approach, the initiative nearly doubled the share of students who met the government’s literacy benchmarks from 2014 to 2021. 22 Joseph Destefano et al., “Scaling up successfully: Lessons from Kenya’s Tusome national literacy program,” Journal of Educational Change , July 2018, Volume 19.

If everything is a priority, nothing is. Carey Wright, Former State Superintendent of Mississippi

Cultivate leadership beyond a single leader. True transformation can take a decade, but few leaders have that much time. Successful systems invest in civil servants who outlast political leaders and build a deep bench of talent at the central office (especially at the n-2 level 23 “N-2” is the organizational layer two levels below the minister—the individuals who report to the executive team that reports to the minister. These leaders are more likely to stay in place through political changes. ), at the middle layer, and across schools. Leaders foster institutions beyond the ministry, insulating education from politics by distancing the work from political structures and enabling a greater ecosystem of experts who can support policy development and implementation. Longevity also comes from embedding educational change into policies and procedures that are harder to reverse.

In Norway, for example, policy continuation was facilitated by the stability of senior civil servants from the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research and Directorate for Education and Training. These trusted institutions provided a common set of evidence-based research that both parties relied on as the fact base for policy. When the 2012 PISA results were released, leaders in both political parties called the same senior civil servant to understand the data and implications for policy. 24 Li-Kai Chen, Emma Dorn, and Tore Vamraak, “ Education reform in Norway: Looking beyond politics to bring sustained change ,” McKinsey, June 21, 2019. In Morocco, ministry leaders enshrined reforms in a framework law with bipartisan support and created binding mechanisms for new leadership to manage implementation.

My initiative is now being fulfilled by a conservative government. This kind of continuity gives me hope for the future. Kristin Halvorsen, Former Minister of Education of Norway

Engage educators and families authentically. Authentic engagement is hard to do well, but successful school systems treat it as nonnegotiable. Successful systems actively collect diverse stakeholder input at the outset and throughout implementation to design and refine policies that will resonate and work in the classroom. In practice, this includes engaging teacher, principal, and student advisory boards; conducting regular surveys of parents, students, and educators to keep a pulse; and ensuring that every member of the executive cabinet visits a diverse range of schools at least twice a month. Successful systems then create compelling change stories and use a broad tool kit to influence changes at the school and classroom level.

For example, during Kaya Henderson’s tenure as school chancellor in Washington, DC, the public school system worked closely with communities to communicate how school closures would lead to more resources in remaining schools, and it sought community input on how to transform school communities. When the district made subsequent closure decisions, there was less pushback from the community than otherwise expected. Overall, public school enrollment grew during this time period for the first time in decades, pointing to strengthened public confidence in the system. 25 Emma Dorn, “ Lessons in leadership: Transforming struggling US K–12 schools ,” McKinsey, March 28, 2023. Cecilia María Vélez White, former minister of education in Colombia, held monthly meetings with principals, convened more than 1,500 teachers, shared information with unions, and went on a listening tour to a different region every week. 26 Andres Cadena, Li-Kai Chen, Felipe Child, and Emma Dorn, “ Bringing major improvements to education in Colombia ,” McKinsey, May 29, 2019.

We asked people, ‘Ten years from now, what should DCPS look like? What are your hopes and your dreams for the district and for your students?’ Kaya Henderson, Former Chancellor of DC Public Schools

Create delivery capacity to scale

Create coordination and a cadence for change. Successful systems move quickly to turn their plans into action. They create a concrete road map, pressure-test their implementation plans, and ensure the budget is oriented around priorities. They pace their changes to show quick wins in the first six months to demonstrate momentum. At the same time, they design for scale to ensure that changes have their intended impact.

For example, as part of the London Challenge initiative, London appointed dedicated advisers who were deployed to the schools that were struggling the most. The advisers provided on-the-ground coaching and brought immediate recommendations back to the central department so resources could be deployed rapidly. 27 Marc Kidson and Emma Norris, Implementing the London Challenge, Institute for Government , July 10, 2014. South Africa created free literacy workbooks, adapted them to native languages, and distributed copies to 6.5 million students across 20,000 schools. A dedicated delivery team oversaw the entire process, from development to printing and delivery of the workbooks, and 40,000 trained teachers provided support for adoption. 28 “20,000 schools to receive workbooks,” SANews, July 6, 2010. From 2011 to 2015, more than 150 million workbooks were delivered to schools. 29 “South African women and girls empowered by literacy programme to take their place in society,” UNESCO, September 7, 2015.

You can be nimble and agile. The fact that you can work at a ridiculously higher speed than government normally works makes people believe in you in a completely different way. Sir Jon Coles, Former Director of the London Challenge

Build implementation structures and skills. Many school systems struggle to access the in-house talent to implement major changes. In addition to great educators, school systems need great project managers and implementors to translate strategy at the ministry into implementation in every classroom across the system. Successful systems ensure dedicated implementation capacity within the central team, at the middle layer, and across schools. This involves establishing clear roles and responsibilities for making decisions and approving investments, as well as creating an army of changemakers in the field to bring changes to fruition. Systems can then assess their delivery capacity across this structure and hire or build missing capabilities.

For example, under Jaime Saavedra’s leadership in Peru, the ministry brought in experienced managers from within and outside of government, with a specific goal of improving management and the pace of change. At the same time, Peru also reformed the process for selecting its 15,000 school principals to ensure high-caliber management talent in schools. 30 Li-Kai Chen, Felipe Child, Emma Dorn, and Raimundo Morales, “ An interview with former Peruvian Minister of Education Jaime Saavedra ,” McKinsey, September 26, 2019. In Ceará, Brazil, the 150 highest-performing schools adopted the 150 lowest-performing schools. If the lower-performing school improved, both schools in the pair were financially rewarded. This pairing of successful and struggling schools has also worked in London and in Shanghai. In Shanghai, deputy school leaders of successful schools can only be promoted to principal or school leader if they first lead the turnaround of a struggling school. 31 Joanna Farmer and Ben Jensen, School turnaround in Shanghai: The empowered-management program approach to improving school performance , Center for American Progress, May 2013.

I ended up changing most of the top 60 positions in the ministry to ensure the right managerial skills and implementation capacity, including attracting people from the Ministry of Finance. Jaime Saavedra, Former Minister of Education of Peru

Drive and adapt with data

Measure student outcomes and make them transparent. Successful school leaders build robust data systems, identify trends, and use the data to build a shared culture of continuous improvement. They make important information public to build momentum, segment schools for accountability and support, and use data to drive improvement at every level, from system strategy to instruction in schools.

For example, in Estonia, student outcome data is linked with broader social data. The government maintains a centralized data system for all public services with a unique ID for each citizen. Families can look at their own child’s achievement data within this broader context. The ministry makes school-level data transparent to the public and regularly uses this data to support policy making. Data is sufficiently protected, and there is a high degree of trust among citizens. 32 “Building an integrated data system: Lessons from Estonia,” NCEE, May 2, 2021. In Sierra Leone, the ministry has built data systems from the ground up, digitalizing the school census and linking it to student performance data, enabling data to become the reference point for all interventions. Data on gender inequities in access has informed new policies, which have helped increase enrollment among girls. 33 Tichafara Chisaka and Kate Richards, “Supporting girls’ education in Sierra Leone through inclusive data systems,” Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, July 19, 2021.

I made sure that we had data to inform everything we did. From day one, all policies had to be grounded in data and evidence. David Moinina Sengeh, Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education and Chief Innovation Officer for Sierra Leone

Roll out what works, but create space for innovation. Successful systems create space for innovation and, critically, measure what they innovate to add to the existing evidence base of what works. Most innovation in education systems will likely be oriented toward continuous improvement and sustaining practices. However, there is also a need for more-disruptive innovation, especially in systems where performance is poor or below poor and where exponential growth in achievement is needed. Innovation is needed both to improve the effectiveness of existing interventions and to create more-scalable models.

For example, structured pedagogy approaches currently provide the best evidence base for improving literacy and numeracy across low-income countries—but financial and human capital constraints mean that systems will not be able to roll out and scale such approaches rapidly enough to reach this generation of students. In Malawi, education leaders are scaling up a foundational literacy and numeracy program that uses robust, solar-powered, offline tablets in primary-school education. The intervention was first tested as a pilot with external partners, and the government has built a team strictly focused on the rollout. A big part of the innovation is in the streamlined implementation—schools and teachers can be set up to run the program within weeks. The program is being measured and tested as it scales. 34 “Building Education Foundations through Innovation & Technology: Malawi scale-up program overview,” Government of Malawi Ministry of Education, September 8, 2022.

Singapore has demonstrated that even the most successful school systems need to keep innovating, particularly as the needs of students change. This has led to new experiments and investments in social-emotional learning and 21st century skills to complement the already-strong approach to math and literacy instruction, based on emerging research on the importance of student mindsets on educational outcomes. 35 Dennis Kwek, Jeanne Ho, and Hwei Ming Wong, “Singapore’s educational reforms toward holistic outcomes,” Brookings, March 16, 2023. Singapore’s system is unique among top PISA scorers in that it continues to grow while others have stagnated.

When we talk about professional learning, we can never say we have arrived. . . . The moment we say we have arrived, that will cause our downfall. Yen Ching Chua-Lim, Deputy Director-General of Education (Professional Development), Singapore

Individually, these strategies may seem obvious or incremental. Together, they are transformative. The slow and steady work of implementation sets improving school systems apart from the rest. This is not really a story about beating the odds. It is a story about the systems that were able to change the odds. Education leaders can—and must—learn from them.

Jake Bryant is a partner in McKinsey’s Seattle office; Felipe Child is partner in the Bogota office; Ezgi Demirdag is a partner in the Istanbul office; Emma Dorn is a senior knowledge expert and associate partner in the Silicon Valley office; Stephen Hall and Roman Tschupp are partners in the Dubai office; Kartik Jayaram is a senior partner in the Nairobi office; Charag Krishnan is a partner in the New Jersey office; Cheryl Lim is a partner in the Kuala Lumpur office; Kemi Onabanjo is an expert associate partner in the Lagos office; Frédéric Panier is a partner in the Brussels office, where Pierre Vigin is an expert associate partner; Juan Rebolledo is an associate partner in the Mexico City office; Jimmy Sarakatsannis is a senior partner in the Washington, DC office; Doug Scott is a senior expert in the Chicago office; and Seckin Ungur is a partner in the Sydney office. Emmy Liss is a senior adviser to McKinsey’s Education Practice

The authors wish to acknowledge the tireless work of school system leaders, school principals, and particularly classroom teachers, who have dedicated their lives to educating youth and who are working every day to close gaps in student achievement. This research benefited from the contributions of hundreds of global education experts and McKinsey team members. Please see the larger report for a complete set of acknowledgments.

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AI Presentation Maker

When lack of inspiration or time constraints are something you’re worried about, it’s a good idea to seek help. Slidesgo comes to the rescue with its latest functionality—the AI Presentation Maker! With a few clicks, you’ll have wonderful slideshows that suit your own needs . And it’s totally free!

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Generate presentations in minutes

We humans make the world move, but we need to sleep, rest and so on. What if there were someone available 24/7 for you? It’s time to get out of your comfort zone and ask the AI Presentation Maker to give you a hand. The possibilities are endless : you choose the topic, the tone and the style, and the AI will do the rest. Now we’re talking!

Customize your AI-generated presentation online

Alright, your robotic pal has generated a presentation for you. But, for the time being, AIs can’t read minds, so it’s likely that you’ll want to modify the slides. Please do! We didn’t forget about those time constraints you’re facing, so thanks to the editing tools provided by one of our sister projects —shoutouts to Wepik — you can make changes on the fly without resorting to other programs or software. Add text, choose your own colors, rearrange elements, it’s up to you! Oh, and since we are a big family, you’ll be able to access many resources from big names, that is, Freepik and Flaticon . That means having a lot of images and icons at your disposal!

creating learning presentations

How does it work?

Think of your topic.

First things first, you’ll be talking about something in particular, right? A business meeting, a new medical breakthrough, the weather, your favorite songs, a basketball game, a pink elephant you saw last Sunday—you name it. Just type it out and let the AI know what the topic is.

Choose your preferred style and tone

They say that variety is the spice of life. That’s why we let you choose between different design styles, including doodle, simple, abstract, geometric, and elegant . What about the tone? Several of them: fun, creative, casual, professional, and formal. Each one will give you something unique, so which way of impressing your audience will it be this time? Mix and match!

Make any desired changes

You’ve got freshly generated slides. Oh, you wish they were in a different color? That text box would look better if it were placed on the right side? Run the online editor and use the tools to have the slides exactly your way.

Download the final result for free

Yes, just as envisioned those slides deserve to be on your storage device at once! You can export the presentation in .pdf format and download it for free . Can’t wait to show it to your best friend because you think they will love it? Generate a shareable link!

What is an AI-generated presentation?

It’s exactly “what it says on the cover”. AIs, or artificial intelligences, are in constant evolution, and they are now able to generate presentations in a short time, based on inputs from the user. This technology allows you to get a satisfactory presentation much faster by doing a big chunk of the work.

Can I customize the presentation generated by the AI?

Of course! That’s the point! Slidesgo is all for customization since day one, so you’ll be able to make any changes to presentations generated by the AI. We humans are irreplaceable, after all! Thanks to the online editor, you can do whatever modifications you may need, without having to install any software. Colors, text, images, icons, placement, the final decision concerning all of the elements is up to you.

Can I add my own images?

Absolutely. That’s a basic function, and we made sure to have it available. Would it make sense to have a portfolio template generated by an AI without a single picture of your own work? In any case, we also offer the possibility of asking the AI to generate images for you via prompts. Additionally, you can also check out the integrated gallery of images from Freepik and use them. If making an impression is your goal, you’ll have an easy time!

Is this new functionality free? As in “free of charge”? Do you mean it?

Yes, it is, and we mean it. We even asked our buddies at Wepik, who are the ones hosting this AI Presentation Maker, and they told us “yup, it’s on the house”.

Are there more presentation designs available?

From time to time, we’ll be adding more designs. The cool thing is that you’ll have at your disposal a lot of content from Freepik and Flaticon when using the AI Presentation Maker. Oh, and just as a reminder, if you feel like you want to do things yourself and don’t want to rely on an AI, you’re on Slidesgo, the leading website when it comes to presentation templates. We have thousands of them, and counting!.

How can I download my presentation?

The easiest way is to click on “Download” to get your presentation in .pdf format. But there are other options! You can click on “Present” to enter the presenter view and start presenting right away! There’s also the “Share” option, which gives you a shareable link. This way, any friend, relative, colleague—anyone, really—will be able to access your presentation in a moment.

Discover more content

This is just the beginning! Slidesgo has thousands of customizable templates for Google Slides and PowerPoint. Our designers have created them with much care and love, and the variety of topics, themes and styles is, how to put it, immense! We also have a blog, in which we post articles for those who want to find inspiration or need to learn a bit more about Google Slides or PowerPoint. Do you have kids? We’ve got a section dedicated to printable coloring pages! Have a look around and make the most of our site!

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Workshop: Presentation Skills for a Virtual Audience

How information is presented can determine the effectiveness of the message and its outcome.

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By HR NewsWire

Presentation skills are vital for serious business professionals—and have been ramped up in today's increased remote working environment.

How information is presented to groups and individuals can determine the effectiveness of the message and its outcome. Virtual presentation skills can affect the speaker's influence and credibility and make a remarkable difference when getting the message across to listeners.

A program titled Presentation Skills for a Virtual Audience gives learners the techniques and skills necessary for an effective virtual presentation and helps them engage their remote audience with confidence.

Register here for the two-part workshop, which will be offered virtually by Learning Solutions from 9 a.m. to noon on Monday, March 25, and Tuesday, March 26.

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COMMENTS

  1. 10 Tips To Create Effective eLearning Presentations And Slideshows

    So, make sure that the colors, fonts, branding, and overall design of the project flows well and is consistent throughout the presentation or slideshow. Also, the design should effectively reflect your brand's image and message. Include audio or video to create a more immersive experience. Audio or video integration is ideal, especially if you ...

  2. 10 Tips for creating an effective training presentation

    10 Tips for creating an effective training presentation. Creating a training presentation is not a simple task. Unlike your usual PowerPoints, a training deck should convey work-related information in a way that keeps your team engaged and creates a positive learning experience. Quite a challenge, if you ask me - especially in online environments.

  3. How to Create Engaging Educational PowerPoint Presentations

    Let's look at the main steps it takes to create an engaging educational PowerPoint presentation. You can use Google Slides, Keynotes, or any other presentation software to create one. #1 Define the objectives. First, you have to set a learning goal. It refers to what your audience will know after seeing your presentation.

  4. What Are Effective Presentation Skills (and How to Improve Them)

    Presentation skills are the abilities and qualities necessary for creating and delivering a compelling presentation that effectively communicates information and ideas. They encompass what you say, how you structure it, and the materials you include to support what you say, such as slides, videos, or images. You'll make presentations at various ...

  5. 23 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Creating Engaging Presentations

    Best Practice PowerPoint Presentation Tips. Use A Consistent Presentation Design. One Topic Per Slide. Avoid information overwhelm by using the "Rule of Three". Display one bullet at a time. Presentation Blunders To Avoid. Avoid unnecessary animations. Only add content that supports your main points.

  6. How to Make an Educational PowerPoint Presentation Quickly

    Step 4. Teach With Visualizations. For the visual learners in the audience, it helps to have a chart or graph that illustrates the concept at hand. You might have the most eloquent speaking points in the rest of the presentation, but a well-made chart could be the key to driving your point home.

  7. What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

    Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired ...

  8. Creating an E-Learning Presentation with PowerPoint: Here's How!

    Creating the learning unit: The creation of the learning unit in E-Learning PowerPoint presentations differs from that of a linearly structured presentation. For E-Learning presentations, more complex structures with multiple levels or branching paths are recommended. This helps learners navigate through the online course in various ways.

  9. Google Slides Training

    Learn how to use Google Slides to create engaging presentations, make fewer class copies, and more. Watch video.

  10. Create a presentation in PowerPoint

    To create a presentation from scratch, select Blank Presentation. To use a prepared design, select one of the templates. To see tips for using PowerPoint, select Take a Tour, and then select Create, . Add a slide. In the thumbnails on the left pane, select the slide you want your new slide to follow.

  11. Optimizing PowerPoint for E-learning

    When you're creating e-learning courses, to keep your learners engaged, you have to "keep it moving". This means that your audience shouldn't be staring at the same slide for too long. ... While your PowerPoint presentation most likely includes some degree of images and visuals, you're going to have to amplify them for your e-learning ...

  12. Basic tasks for creating a PowerPoint presentation

    Select the text. Under Drawing Tools, choose Format. Do one of the following: To change the color of your text, choose Text Fill, and then choose a color. To change the outline color of your text, choose Text Outline, and then choose a color. To apply a shadow, reflection, glow, bevel, 3-D rotation, a transform, choose Text Effects, and then ...

  13. Presentations for Each Type of Learner

    Allowing your presentation to have some aspect of physical participation, even it's as simple as an informal poll involving raised hands. Not all adults use the same tactics to learn and retain new information. By understanding the various learning styles, you can adjust your presentations to reach your whole audience.

  14. Effective Business Presentations with Powerpoint

    Step 1 - Know your audience and Step 2 - Know your purpose • 6 minutes. Step 3 - Structure the body of your presentation • 7 minutes. Step 4 - Plan how you will start your presentation • 3 minutes. Step 5 - Plan how you will end your presentation • 2 minutes. Step 6 - Prepare your visual aids • 3 minutes.

  15. Our Top 8 Tips For Creating Effective Training Presentations!

    An effective presentation will create a great learning experience for your audience and will illustrate the main message throughout the presentation. Youth Employment Services Training Presentation . Youth Employment Services (YES) was faced with the challenge of developing a training series aimed at you guessed it, increasing youth employment. ...

  16. Tips for creating and delivering an effective presentation

    Use graphics to help tell your story. Don't overwhelm your audience by adding too many graphics to a slide, however. Make labels for charts and graphs understandable. Use only enough text to make label elements in a chart or graph comprehensible. Make slide backgrounds subtle and keep them consistent.

  17. How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation (Step-by-Step)

    Note: Before you open PowerPoint and start creating your presentation, make sure you've collected your thoughts. If you're going to make your slides compelling, you need to spend some time brainstorming. For help with this, see our article with tips for nailing your business presentation here. The first thing you'll need to do is to open PowerPoint.

  18. PowerPoint 101: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

    Step 1: Make a draft to structure your presentation. As we said before, writing a draft or script of your content will be vital to start on the right foot as a PowerPoint beginner. This advice is so important that we choose it as the first step to learning how to make a PowerPoint presentation.

  19. Create Stunning Presentations: 7 Best Microsoft PowerPoint Courses for

    Best PowerPoint Animated Videos Course (Udemy) 4-5 hours. Best Presentation Design Course for Business (LinkedIn Learning) 1-2 hours. Best Microsoft 365 - PowerPoint Crash Course (LinkedIn Learning) 1-2 hours. Also Great: Effective Business Presentations with PowerPoint (PwC) 11 hours.

  20. PowerPoint Online Training Courses

    PowerPoint Online Training Courses. Learn all about PowerPoint with our expert-taught PowerPoint training videos. Watch a beginner, intermediate, or advanced PowerPoint how-to on designing ...

  21. The Beginner's Guide to Microsoft PowerPoint

    Learn everything you need to know to get started using Microsoft PowerPoint! You'll learn all the basics plus more, including: how to choose a design theme...

  22. Creating more immersive presentations in Google Slides

    Creating more immersive presentations in Google Slides Thursday, February 15, 2024 ... Once in slideshow mode, your camera feed will appear in that shape so you can deliver a captivating presentation. Speaker spotlight also integrates seamlessly with Meet and Slides Recordings for more engaging virtual or recorded presentations.

  23. PowerPoint for Beginners

    Get started with PowerPoint for Beginners. Follow this 20-Minute step by step PowerPoint tutorial to start creating presentations smoothly.Contents of this v...

  24. 5 golden rules of PowerPoint design

    Consider employing the "5-5-5" rule. No more than 5 lines, no more than 5 words, no more than 5 minutes. Think short and sharp memory joggers instead of rambling paragraphs. Where possible, consider replacing text with visuals to represent your point. People remember images more than words. Customize this free minimalist PowerPoint template. 3.

  25. How to Start a Work Presentation, Be Engaging: Public Speaking Expert

    You could also try to form a personal connection. Often, presentations lack a personal touch. Try sharing a relevant personal anecdote or experience that relates to your topic. This not only makes ...

  26. Spark & Sustain: How all of the world's school systems can improve

    This is creating a scissor effect: learning losses are colliding with an increasing need for higher-order skills. The stakes are high: if historical trends continue, more than 700 million children will remain in learning poverty in 2050. The pandemic wiped out decades of educational improvements, and we cannot wait decades to make up these losses.

  27. Free AI Presentation Maker

    AI Presentation Maker. When lack of inspiration or time constraints are something you're worried about, it's a good idea to seek help. Slidesgo comes to the rescue with its latest functionality—the AI Presentation Maker! With a few clicks, you'll have wonderful slideshows that suit your own needs. And it's totally free! Get started.

  28. Workshop: Presentation Skills for a Virtual Audience

    A program titled Presentation Skills for a Virtual Audience gives learners the techniques and skills necessary for an effective virtual presentation and helps them engage their remote audience with confidence. ... which will be offered virtually by Learning Solutions from 9 a.m. to noon on Monday, March 25, and Tuesday, March 26. Posted in ...