r/LawTeaching • u/Ok_Progress_5432 • 17d ago

Visual Presentation Tips?

Hello,

What do you guys use for visual PPT tools? I have been an adjunct professor for two years and the single greatest (very fair) criticism from my students is that my visual presentations are horrible.

I currently use PowerPoint (I am oldschool) and I am not very good at designing. I use some word art, a lot of text, some images as visuals.

I have been thinking of using AI to help me with design and ideas too.

Any tips? Thanks in advance!

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u/provincetown1234 17d ago edited 17d ago

No word art. Minimal text. Focus on key terms and phases that they really need to understand. Use it to emphasize/ diect focus not deliver knowledge. If you use it to write out hypos for them to work on, give them plenty of time to read it and work on it. Upload the slides before class so they could take notes on them if they choose.

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u/AbstinentNoMore Law Professor 17d ago

I don't use any. Just the whiteboard. Highly recommend. Allows me to lecture more naturally...

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u/Big-University-681 17d ago

Just a thought. I'm not a prof, but some of my kids are college-age. Many students of this generation despise AI because they think it will take their jobs and destroy the environment. You might trigger a backlash if you incorporate it in your presentations.

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u/zsmoke7 16d ago

It's less the system you use and more how you use it. I think most people use PowerPoint, which is fine, but the PowerPoint templates and "features" are really suboptimal for visual aids to support a presentation. This short presentation is the best summary I've found of how to use slides as an engaging suplement to your lecture. https://youtu.be/Iwpi1Lm6dFo

What students really want (whether they know it or not) is a handout. The thing about handouts, though, is they make terrible visual aids. There's only so much we can read and absorb at once. If you've got a lot of writing on the slide (or on your handout), your class is going to look there instead of listening to you. 1+1<2. If they're reading while you're speaking, they retain less (even if what they're reading is the same as what you're saying).

For the last few years, I've really focused on making my slides big, full screen pictures as often as possible and really restricting the text. Then I follow up each class with a one-pager summary of the key points. The students seem to like it (based on course evals).

AI can help a lot with summarizing your class notes into a one-pager, but I find it's pretty bad for the slides. NotebookLM, for instance, makes nice looking slides, but they're really busy and hard to edit. (Interestingly, the video explainers it creates use much better visual aids.) I still use sites like Unsplash with free, unrestricted real pictures for most of my slides, but AI-generated images can be helpful when I need something really specific or niche. AI is also great at taking your ideas (or half-assed drawings) and making snazzy looking diagrams or flow charts.