flexible undidactic freestyle PowerPoint presentations

[Guest]

Typical presentations are didactic, pedantic, and dogmatic in the sense that
the presenter has selected the order in which the slides are shown and the
info is presented. This can be appropriate in cases where the topic is
complex and the audience knows little about the subject. However, when the
body of knowledge is a fairly tidy package and people come to hear info that
they may already know something about, many speakers find that letting the
audience drive the program with their own statements and questions produces a
livlier discussion, more participation, and greater satisfaction and
learning. This process can teach the speaker perhaps a better, more n
atural order for presenting the info than onemight predict.

Thus, what is needed is the ability to have a prepared presentation from
which illustrative slides can be selected "on the fly" in response to
audience questions and comments. If the final order of slides could be
saved, it might produce an order more in line with how audiences come into
the session should a didactic presentation of the info be warranted for a
different audience.

 

[David M. Marcovitz]

Are you looking for a way to do this? It is certainly possible with
PowerPoint but not easy. First, you would need some kind of a menu that
links to every other slide in the presentation. With simple hyperlinks,
any order can be achieved. This could either be done by having a separate
menu slide (so after each slide you return to the menu slide) or you
could put the menu on each slide (but that would crowd the slides if
there are too many possibilities).

Now, if you want to remember the order that was chosen, this could be
done with some VBA programming. It's wouldn't be hard to do if you know
VBA, but it requires VBA and also won't work with the PowerPoint Viewer,
just the full version of PowerPoint.

--David

--
David M. Marcovitz
Director of Graduate Programs in Educational Technology
Loyola College in Maryland
Author of _Powerful PowerPoint for Educators_
http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/