Over the years I’ve seen a lot of slides as part of either online courses or presentation decks. One common area for improvement that I see is not using the full slide. Fortunately, this is usually a pretty easy thing to fix.
Let’s take a look at an example. This first slide is a pretty common approach to including screenshots on a slide. While it’s far from the worst thing I’ve ever seen, there’s plenty of room for improvement.
Compare the slide above with this one below…
Which one do you prefer? Personally, the second option feels much more complete and natural. Kind of like the way I’d see it on my computer screen. And speaking of computer screens, if for any reason you can’t size up your image to fill the screen putting it in some sort of “container” to give it context is another good idea. There are a number of good online mockup sites that make this super easy. Dunnnk.com is a good one that I used for this image below.
Finally, be sure you’re bringing in those call outs one at a time. Here is the traditional way of doing that with animations. [ Click the image to see it full size.]
You can even improve upon this version by using PowerPoint’s Emphasis animations to dim each callout when moving on to the next. This is an easy way to direct attention to the one you are currently talking about. This example below uses the “Desaturate” animation effect but depending on your slide and what you’re animating other goods ones might include: “Darken”, “Lighten”, “Transparency”, “Object Color”, “Complementary Color”, or “Fill Color”
What would you do differently? How do you like to use screenshots in your courses or presentation decks?
Mike Taylor 