This week we began studying presentation design. I had no idea...

It is funny but I have been talking to my students about how to design a better powerpoint.  I have watched Life after Death by Powerpoint several times before and agree with him completely.  Some of the things that I can't stand is when my students go crazy with the animations.  It is like he said, the flying lines are so distracting.  I used to like them and think that they were interesting but now they are just annoying.  I like to use a few to put my point across but only a few. 
As I went through these presentations, I realized that some of it looked familiar.  I have seen some boring powerpoints in my time.  They left me feeling tired and bored.  Then I have seen some great ones and I get excited about the topic.  These powerpoints capture my interest through their use of effective images.  I think that images are awesome at grabbing my brain.  The more interesting the picture, the more I want to find out what they picture relates to.  I had no idea about the different places you can find pictures to use and to get higher resolutions.  I am starting to realize that I hate using clipart.  I would rather go and find pictures and I will check out the sites from these presentations.  One other thing that I haven't really thought about was the practice and prep time.  I have slapped together presentations with little thought and put too much info on the slides.  I have started to come away from that.  I now look more into using images and less words on my slides.  Plus I stick to a few points and then talk about things that relate to those points in my presentation. 
I also like the idea about CRAP.  It is a great way to set up and check your presentations.   Notice that I say presentations instead of powerpoint.  I have started to expand away from powerpoints.  I have used glogsters, prezi, posters, classtools.net, and others to create presentations.  I want to learn more about other presentation tools.  Hopefully, I can start creating more with these other presentation modes.