No More Ugly Slides - Teaching Using CueCam Presenter

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If you’ve been looking at tutorials on how to make presentations for the classroom, you’ve probably seen some ugly stuff.

Going over the top YouTube results I see things like this:

Even the clearest teachers seem to end up with ugly slides!

Teachers ≠ Graphic Designers*

You’re a teacher, not a graphic designer and presentation software has not made it easy for you to create beautiful slides.

Today I’ll explain how these tools waste your time by pulling you in the wrong direction, and I’ll show you how CueCam subverts the problem.

*Well, unless they’re graphic design teachers!

Why this happens

Tools like Canva, Powerpoint and Keynote all get you started by making you choose a template.

Tt can be exciting to have so many different possibilities for your slides, but the problem is that they all favour style over substance.

Or, more precisely:

Presentation over content

What does this mean?

Presentation is how you show something. Essentially it’s the “frame”.

The content is what you’re showing. The art inside the frame.

If you have this

Why would you want something like this?

A busy frame detracts from its content.

When you’re teaching, it adds confusion.

There are three elements to a remote presentation

*1 Content

*2 Styling

*3 You

An exciting template tends to cause style to dominate content (or require certain content to work).

An exciting template also tends to fail to give YOU anywhere to be.

When you’re more prominent on screen (like I am here), the last thing you need is a lot of text and these templates tend to be incredibly text-heavy.

Pretty, but what if you’re mainly showing images?

More visual but still very text-heavy and overbearing. And what happens if you want to put in different images?

If you use the one they gave you, the colours match, we have some labels.

But if we wanted something even a little different...

It looks bad, and if you’re not a graphic designer you won’t know why, or how to fix it. (fonts are different, colour scheme has changed, different art style, white background, etc.. etc..)

So the moment you start customising something like this the result immediately takes on that scrappy look, which the overbearing design only adds to by showing it up.

Keynote

These presentation designs look nice until you think about why. It’s often down to the photography. As soon as you put in your own photography, it won’t look good.