PETAL

A Few Tips on Giving Students Your PowerPoint Slides

One of the most popular applications of PowerPoint to the teaching and learning process is professors making their slides available to students before or after lectures. When students get slides before class, they very commonly print the slides to aid their note taking.

It is beyond the scope of this post to consider the advantages and disadvantages of whether to distribute slides before or after class, or whether even to distribute them at all. The important thing, however, is that slides are being distributed. But are they being distributed in the best way for students to download and print them?

I have long recommended that the best way to do this is to convert the PowerPoint file to PDF. However, doing this requires either Adobe Acrobat (which requires money) or the Office2007 plug-in that allows you to save Office files as PDF. Also, unless considerable graphic detail is required, I suggest you "print" the slides to PDF, either six or three slides per page (depending on whether you want the note taking lines that the three-slide option provides).

Making the slides available as PDF offers several advantages. First, it generally creates a much smaller file, especially when your slides have a lot of graphics, which makes for much easier downloads. It also doesn't require your students to have PowerPoint on their computer (virtually everyone has the Acrobat Reader).

You can also improve the readability and printability of your slides by temporarily changing the theme design to a boring white background with black text for printing (you'd never "pimp" up a simple Word document for printing, would you?). You can also make it grayscale instead of color to save printer toner for the student (or the campus computer lab).

To convert your slides to PDF, simply go to print the slideshow as though you were printing it out yourself. If you have Acrobat installed, choose "Adobe PDF" as your printer. In the Print What box, choose Handouts and then choose how many slides per page. As I said above, I recommend 6 per page, but you can choose 3 if you want the note taking lines on the right. Something to consider is when you choose 4 slides per page, the slides are the same size on the page as when you do six, so that offers no advantages. The same thing is true for when you choose 1 or 2 slides. The size of the slide is the same on the page whether you have 1 or 2, so you might as well choose 2. PowerPoint also offers an option of printing 9 per page, but the slides are so small that it is difficult to read all but the largest text sizes.

If you don't have Acrobat but do have Office 2007, there is a free download from the Microsoft Office website that allows you to save files as PDFs. Creating a "Handout" PDF is a little harder to do than when you have Acrobat, but it's not too hard. And hey, it's free. The difficulty is that when you save the file as a PDF, it chooses your default print settings, which is normally full-color, full-page slides. However, if you go to print your slides as I mentioned above (don't worry about choosing a printer though), and choose your settings, you can then hit Print Preview instead of Print. If it looks good, close the Print Preview. This changes your print settings, so when you save it as a PDF, it will be formatted correctly.

If you have neither Acrobat nor Office 2007, the best thing to do is take a little time to advise your students on how best to print the files on their own. You can aid their downloading and printing burden, however, by removing your design theme (or background graphics) and compressing your images to screen resolution (96 dpi-you would be amazed at how much this simple action can reduce file size). To do this, right-click on any graphic in your presentation, and choose Format Picture. Then choose Compress Pictures, choose Screen resolution, and choose Apply to All Images.

If you want to learn more about these and other tips on teaching with PowerPoint, PETAL will be holding a Teaching with PowerPoint workshop on September 17 & 18.