Pictures

Pictures

How pictures help your presentation/lesson
Creating picture slides
Incorporate them as you speak
Adding text
Cartoons
Clipart
Special audience needs

How pictures help your presentation/lesson

Pictures help your audience understand and remember by stimulating extra parts of their brains while you are talking. Known as ’Dual coding’, this means the information is interpreted and stored in two ways.

Speech alone stimulates a limited part of the brain

Showing a relevant picture at the same time as speaking to an audience doubles the chance they will remember your point. It also makes it much more likely they will understand a new topic.

Speech and visual image combined can stimulate over twice as much brain

If you find it difficult to break free from text slides, try adding pictures every second or third slide and see how your audiences react. It’s really important to link the visual aid as you speak by taking your audience’s attention into the picture. Ask them to look at a certain interesting part of the picture, – say something like, ‘There’s something really interesting in this picture I’d like to point out’, or ‘Look at the man's head on the left’. Try not to use pictures just as decoration.

Creating your own picture slides

You can create your own picture slides from:

· Photographs you have taken yourself

· Pictures in books and journals scanned into a PC

· Pictures downloaded from the internet

Once you have the image stored on your computer, insert it into a PowerPoint slide. The minimum size for a full screen picture to be clear is 800 pixels high (less than this and it will be blurred). If a picture is larger than 800 pixels, select the ‘Compress Pictures’ command from the drawing toolbar to reduce there size and ensure your presentation is not so large it slows the presentation.

Note: if you wish to use images from the internet or printed material, you must obtain permission from the originator first, explaining what you propose to use it for.

Incorporating pictures as you speak

Visual aids work best when you direct your audience’s attention to them. Point out something which isn’t immediately obvious in the picture or ask them to see if they can find a particular item or notice anything unusual

Guide your audiences' gaze into your visual aids

Adding text

Adding a small amount of text to a picture can sometimes help reinforce a point. In the example shown here, the speaker does not say the words on the screen, he lets the audience read them first. They link the words and stormy concept in their own minds. Notice how the words have been placed on a dark banner to ensure they are easy to read. If you use this technique, keep the amount of text to a minimum and ensure it can easily be read.

Words added to support a visual metaphors

Cartoons

One or two cartoons shown during a presentation can add welcome humour to an otherwise serious talk. Be sure the cartoon is relevant and not just one you find amusing! You may be able to scan a cartoon from a book or journal but remember, you must ask permission from the originator first. You will probably need to rewrite the caption in larger text so your audience can read it on screen.

Add large text captions to cartoons to aid audience reading

Clipart

Clipart is a collection of ready drawn cartoons. You probably already have some on your PC as part of the Microsoft Office suite. Thousands more can be downloaded from the internet from sites such as Microsoft’s own site here.

Clipart is easily available, but will it help your listeners and learners?

Clipart has two main limitations: usually the picture is not quite what you wanted and secondly, their function is mainly limited to decoration. Only rarely does clipart add to understanding or enhance memory. Stick people shown on the right above (known as Screen Beans) are popular, but due to overuse are now losing their appeal. Try to be original in your choice of graphics and you are much more likely to impress your audience/learners.

Listeners and learners with special needs

Approximately 7% of the males in your audience are likely to have some form of colour blindness. So it’s a good plan when creating any presentation to take a look at how contrasting the images and text are by looking at the whole presentation in black and white view and checking everything is clear. If you can clearly see everything in black and white, there should be sufficient contrast for colour blindness not to be a bar to understanding. Guiding your audience a commentary on your visual aids will also help those who have less than perfect vision.

Acknowledgement: 'Man and Chimpanzee' comes from 'Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language' by Prof Robin Dunbar, Faber & Faber, 2004