Last night, I had to attend the Stony Brook Graduate Research Fair and present about the topic of my final paper for my administrative SBL/SDL certificate. So, I did that.
We were asked to create both a presentation board, and a slideware presentation. Another teacher from my cohort volunteered to take the presentations and put them all on the same flash drive, and bring them to the evening along with all of the requisite IT to display them. Which I was more than happy to take advantage of.
Long time readers will know that I don't take presentations lightly. While mine was relatively straight-forward, I did spend enough time with it to construct a typically cohesive design. And then I sent it over to my colleague.
Powerpoint is a stupid program. If you link multiple presentations together in to one master file, the underlying master of the first presentation will alter all of the rest of them. And this, of course, is what happened. Text out of alignment, general spacing issues, superflous transitions; what was shown last night suffered from all of the above and probably more. Frankly, I couldn't even look at the thing, once it became clear how mangled it had been. And lest it seem that I am blaming someone else, let me be clear in acknowledging that the issue was entirely my own creation. Rather than sending over a native powerpoint file, I should have exported all of the slides as high-resolution images, and sent that over instead. Really, I should know better.
Luckily, it seemed that I was the only person there who cared. Which is good for me, and bad for the legions of budding administrators who will be produced by degree programs that never ask them to consider how they are presenting information to other people.
To make up for it, or at least to make me feel better, I have embedded the original presentation above. Below the presentation, I have posted a pdf of the poster board that I created for anyone who might be interested in such things (you'll need to magnify to read the text, as the page is 30'' by 40'').