Effective Use of Visual Aids

in Student Presentations for "Selected NT Books"

• The purpose is to enhance your presentation, not to detract from it. You need to be clear in your own mind what you want to accomplish with your presentation. In the same way that you need a sense of direction in a sermon or Bible study in order to know how to begin, develop, and end your talk or discussion, you need to determine careful how visual aids fit your teaching goals.
• Ask yourself "How does this picture or this text improve my ability to communicate my point to my audience?"
• Use them sparingly in a lecture context, unless you are pointing out particular details in paintings, etc. In an art-history type lecture, for example, you need to call attention to significant details, and you will probably want to do so with a laser pointer. Power Point slides can take a long time to produce, and if they don't help you that much, you need to ask if the effort is worthwhile.
• Audience needs to know where to look. Do you want them looking at you or at the screen? Visual aids can be distracting. An overhead projector is designed to be turned off and on frequently, but a computer projection unit is not. So, although a projection unit has the benefit of using colorful slides, it needs to remain on as long as you need to use it. The consequence is that people look at the screen instead of you. You are replaced by a digital projection. Is this what you want? For some presentations such focus on the screen is very helpful; for other types it is not.
• Avoid projecting something on the screen and then simply reading it to your audience. They can read. Read what they are reading only if you want to do a dramatic presentation of it or if you are elaborating on an outline (e.g., read the short statement and then explain in more detail). In this case the outline helps them to remember where you are going with your talk, and they can look back and forth from you to the screen, realizing that they are not going to get everything from the screen.
• Projection units are time consuming to set up, and you run the risk of starting your presentation late because you can't get the machine to work right. This can make you look silly and helpless while you fumble around trying to get it to work (take it from one who has had such irritating experiences with non-cooperative computers). You also waste time. Moral = arrive early and get set up before time to start.
• Power Point can also be used effectively in your critiques of other's papers if it helps you to illustrate strengths or weaknesses. Visuals, including film clips or segments of songs, can also be helpful.
• For film clips, ask "How does this clip enhance my point?" or "How does it make a connection for my audience that will help them understand something that they might otherwise miss." Then be sure to make the connection very clear in your presentation and keep coming back to it as you progress. For example, The Matrix is a fascinating movie with a lot of philosophical issues that we can profitably discuss, but if your selection of a segment seems only tangentially related to your exegesis passage, then showing it will merely sidetrack your audience. They may be thinking more about the movie than about the passage you are studying. Film can be used creatively so long as it is integrated well.
• Visual aids are to help you, not to replace you. They don't automatically make you more persuasive. Yet, they can help immensely.
• Play to your strengths. Don't feel like you have to copy what everyone else is doing. Be innovative. Break some molds. But break them in helpful ways. Don't be creative just to be creative. Ask how your creativity aids in facilitating learning.
• Sometimes creativity comes out of mundane chores like washing dishes. As you work on a project and ponder the meaning of a passage, you think about it while doing other tasks. You might be lifting weights and thinking about your passage in Galatians. You might be discussing the text with a friend over a meal, processing it with that person. Suddenly a good idea for communicating your point comes to you. Of course, this means that you have to be working on the project in advance. Last minute creativity is more difficult to develop.

For your presentation, remember that class members have already seen your paper. Your job is to remind them briefly of what they read, not to go through your entire paper orally. Your goal is to facilitate class discussion of the main points of your thesis.