Building new presentations is faster than fixing textbook slides

Eventually everyone will know and use the techniques shown here. Until then I will have to fix files that come with textbooks.


For far too long I tried to fix textbook slides by removing extraneous stuff like headers and footers, changing the background to a solid color, removing bullets, turning the title into complete sentence, and adding a graphic to illustrate the concept in the title.


This seems to take much more work and time than the way I do it now mainly because of the way publishers create the slides. Often even if I change the slide master I still have to work with each slide to fix certain elements.


Now I start with a template, save the file as a new presentation and then copy any useful graphics to slides. Then I build the other slides adding a title and graphic to each.


The template has all the few things I need: a solid background, no header or footer, and fonts the right size so everyone can read the titles no matter where they are in the room.


Sometimes I copy the bullets and change them into sentences to add to the speaker notes, but it is often faster to add my thoughts than to work with the bullets.


I work with the textbook to cover the most important concepts in the chapter and try to use different language than that in the book. Hopefully the students will better learn the material if they can see it presented in more than one way.




Thoughts?


John