One of the ways that I do this is to teach my students how to create their own original design template by using the slide master. The preformatted design templates are overused and not very interesting - plus they usually don't match the topic. I teach students how to go to View / Master / Slide Master and design a template from scratch. I encourage students to choose background colors, designs or images that match their topic.
For example, one of my students in presenting a PowerPoint all about surfing so she found a cool wave photograph that we lightened and place as the background of her slides. Then she chose complimentary colors and fonts for the titles and body paragraphs. She included a navigation bar on the left of the slide and a small image near the title. This slide was saved as a design template and then could be applied to the PowerPoint slides (the one that was written in Word).
The student is now more than half done since all the text and slide formatting is completed. The next steps include changing the slide layouts, transitions and adding images/sounds/movies.
Animations for titles and body paragraphs can be added to the slide master as well as "actions" to link the navigation bar to individual slides.
I asked students to give opinions about the use of the slide master:
- It makes it easier to format all the slides at once.
- You can match your design to your topic.
- It makes the show more professional looking - but I still like change some of the background designs for some slides.
- I probably won't go search for design templates online anymore - I'll just make my own.
- I used to spend a lot of time animating all of the text. Completing the animations in the slide master saves TONS of time.
- I like using the slide master and Word outline together - it's so much easier.
- I never knew that you could add action buttons or hyperlinks in PowerPoint to make the projects more interactive.
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