The term “slide” (as in PowerPoint) comes from the old, 35mm
film slides. An alternative to getting your film developed as
prints, They consisted entirely of the image itself turned into
a transparency. No text. No bullets. No animations. Just visuals
that could be projected while the speaker spoke. Often about his
summer vacation. In some ways it seems like we’d be better off
if we went back to this format. Humans are really good at
understanding verbal and visual input, like full-screen images
with a speaker speaking to them. So the old, 35mm presentations
worked perfectly. Humans are really pretty bad, though, at
processing more than one stream of verbal input at a time. We
really can’t read a slide and listen to the speaker at the same
time. One of the signals has to get ignored. PowerPoint,
Keynote, Prezi, and all the other slide creation tools give us
the ability to do so many amazing things with slides. But it’s
important not to lose sight of how an audience learns
effectively and make sure we take adv