Reflections on my training

Enhancing your presentations with Microsoft PowerPoint

The session went a lot better than I expected. I was worried that as I had run it previously with only 2 staff members it might not work as well with a larger group. In the end only 8 of the 11 booked candidates turned up.

The session flowed well and the participants liked the good examples provded at the beginning as well as some of the tips provided during the session. The only area where I want to add an activity is around the slide layout. After the recommendations were given I felt that there needed to be an activity around having a go with this one one of the slides they brought along.

I have also added a few other things to the session:

• Background colour recommendations from Jisc Techdis and the British Dyslexia Association. Using cream with dark blue text although this can be a preference thing.
• Advising adding hyperlinks by linking text rather than copying in url
• Using alt and tab to navigate to another window during the presentation
• The sounds that are subtle to use with transistions

One of the problems that did occur during the session was around some computers not loading the clipart photos. However I suggested that this was related to the computer and they could use their own or a sample image from the My Pictures file instead. I have added this to the plan.

Another problem occured around changing the colour of the hypertext link. I think this is created by some default styles as you are not able to change the colour by simply trying to change the colour of the text. I will have to look into how to change this.

Overall I was very happy with the way that the session went.