Name: __________________ Due: ______________

The PowerPoint Presentation Assignment

You've completed the research, written an opinion piece, and composed a heart-wrenching play. You searched the Internet and databases. You read the books. You made sense of a lot of facts and wrote a concise research paper. Now, you have the opportunity to educate dazzle your classmates.

YOUR TASK: Create a presentation using PowerPoint that will serve as a tool for a brief speech you will make about your topic. Your job is to educate the class on the important aspects of your cause. You will have three class periods to complete this.

GUIDELINES: Your research paper is the basis for the presentation, but by no means should you simply cut and paste your paper into your presentation. This would be B-O-R-I-N-G! Remember that people don't want to read your paper on the screen, nor do they want to hear you read it to them. Your presentation is to serve as an aid. This means that your slides should be visually compelling and offer bulleted ideas and brief quotes.

Your presentation should contain all of the following elements:

• Your presentation should have at least 8 content slides + a Title Slide & a Bibliography/Works Cited Slide.
• You should dedicate at least one slide to each of the subtopics you defined in your research paper. Use the research from your paper to teach the class what you have learned. DO NOT glom information onto each slide. Make it interesting.
• Include an INTRODUCTORY slide. Introduce the topic, define terms, and.or grab the audience’s attention.
• Include a CONCLUSION slide. This is where you should make your case about your cause: what needs to happen in order to make things change.
• Use at least one graphic per slide from the Internet and/or ClipArt. ClipArt is OK at a minimal level. A lot of it gets dull. It looks babyish. Find graphics from the Internet to make your topic come to life. This helps to make your presentation interesting. USE NETSCAPE to save your Internet images; save them as JPEGs or GIFs, not as Bitmaps. [Bitmaps take a lot of memory and will make your presentation crash if it doesn't make your U drive crash first.] Go to www.google.com and do an image search.
• Use transitions. You have the power to make your points move, animate, and bark sounds at your audience. Imagine that your audience has limited attention span. Your job is to get them to learn something and have fun doing it.
• Know your stuff. Again, the PowerPoint is an aid, a way of taking the attention off of your lovely mug. However, this does not mean that you cease to exist. You are there to present the stuff. The PP should inspire your speech. You may know it by heart, or use your index cards to help your speech. Do not read off your PP only. Remember, most of us know how to read and we can do that ourselves. Who needs you? Teach us something that's not there.
• Be creative. Take advantage of the medium to maximize your lesson for the class. Use yer noggin and make it stick to our minds.