Activity: preparing presentation slides

Powerpoint slides are a part of our everyday life, whether you love them or hate them.  They can be very boring (Winn 2003) and they may not be helpful for information retention (Savoy et al 2009) but most of us would find it difficult to keep the thread of what we want to say, and keep student attention, without some kind of prompts on-screen. Also, they can be very useful for students who struggle to focus, because they allow them to move focus between you and the screen. But if you never use them, definitely skip this activity. 

If you do use them, maybe you would be interested in testing GenAI's promises to help you create them quickly. 

Activity aim: to automate production of presentation slides 

Objective: to evaluate the effectiveness of Gen AI in producing slides for your practice. 

1. 1. There are several packages which promise to produce slides for you, but I suggest you start with something familiar, Powerpoint. You should be able to see a 'CoPilot' button at the right of the 'home' menu. When you click on it, you will get a new panel opening on the right hand side with some prompts: 

      

   2. Click on the box which says "create a presentation about" and this text will appear in the dialogue/prompt box at the bottom of the panel. Type something into the box, such as the subject of one of your classes. 
   3. A set of slides will be created. You can edit these in the usual way, or you can ask Copilot to improve them. You can also use the Designer option, which you may already be familiar with, to improve the look of them.

If you have picked a topic you are reasonably knowledgeable about, you will probably find that the slides look plausible but maybe slightly odd, or in my case, I found that they had many assertions which were not evidenced. I asked Copilot to provide evidence. The first time, it just referenced the slides themselves, but when I asked it to search the web for evidence it did find some half-decent sources. They weren't what I would have used and I didn't agree with all of the assertions. So you would need to weigh up the value of saving time in generating the slides against the time needed to make them scientifically accurate. For basic information they may be quite acceptable. 

 This screencast shows what it looks like. 

 

Another approach, which will probably geneate better quality content, is to use one of the packages you have already used to generate text for a set of slides, and then to paste that text into Powerpoint (use the Outline View), which you can then edit. You can use the Designer tool to create slightly more interesting layouts. Here is a short screencast to show how to do it. 

Time saver or shocking waste of time? It probably depends on the context, as with everything, but at least you've tried it now. 

References 

Savoy, A., Proctor, R. W., & Salvendy, G. (2009). Information retention from PowerPoint™ and traditional lectures. Computers & Education, 52(4), 858-867. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.005 Links to an external site.  
Winn, J. (2003). Avoiding death by PowerPoint. Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, 129(3), 115-118. https://ascelibrary.org/doi/pdf/10.1061/(ASCE)1052-3928(2003)129:3(115)?casa_token=6ur1RWL2xpIAAAAA:fZQueRxFBF-dcDWSpD-cPZZCuVPf7IYq1YM9mD42UGZOFskl8aeDjelpRy33d3QMbkReEWACUDI  Links to an external site. 

 

Bonus: add to your teaching portfolio.

You could use this opportunity to reflect on why you use presentation slides (or why you don't) and what you think they add to your teaching. Is it useful to get ideas from a GenAI tool, or is it quicker and better quality to do everything yourself? What would you recommend to a colleague who is new to teaching?