Death by PowerPoint. Chalk and Talk. Interactive Whiteboard.

All these terms connote tedious teaching running through an uninteractive, uninspiring (and probably uneducated experience).

Yet PowerPoint should enhance teaching.

Compelling visuals and telling questions should help.

Graphic Design Principles

The background should be entirely a picture.

The picture itself should be compelling: something unusual, high-quality, and relating to the points made.

Text should be in text boxes over the picture. Boxes should have glow, shadow, and a slight transparency in order to make the boxes integrate with the design.

The text boxes should be coloured: blue = teaching point; orange bubble = question; green scroll = textual quote.

GIFs should be used in order to demonstrate breaks in the lesson (hinge questions and so on).

Parts of extended work should be used with GIFs, a digital timer (embedded as an object), and integrated music in order to condition such working conditions.

What would subvert these principles?

Pointless white space.

Text over pictures that cannot be seen.

Oversized/too small text.

Pictures that are a small size, and/or positioned randomly.

Irregular fonts.

Constant animations in order to draw attention to points.