Why your PPT slides shouldn't be written by you

Let's Unmute The Audience🎙️. Down with boring, one-way presentations 😡

Hi there!

In this newsletter:

• Join: This little app makes PowerPoint presentations more engaging

• Learn: What if most of your PPT slides weren’t yours?

The biggest problem with PowerPoint?

PowerPoint hasn’t changed much since shoulder pads were in fashion (hello, 80s!).

It still puts audiences to sleep one slide at a time.

But something big is happening. You can unlock real-time audience interaction right inside your deck.

Polls, word clouds, spinner wheels, quizzes, and more, all inside your existing slides.

Join the webinar to see how.

(Spoiler: There are no QR codes, audience links, or second screens to share)

It’s been doing that for 38 years, so it’s quite good at it.

Past events have been super-interesting, with attendees bringing A LOT of questions on how to set up StreamAlive to work in PowerPoint while presenting.

🗓️14th October (Zoom) & 16th October (Teams)
⌚11am EST | 3pm GMT | 8:30pm IST
🌍On Zoom! (Yes, presentations on Zoom can be fun!)

Can’t make it? Click for more timings

What if most slides in your PPT weren’t yours?

Last week, Lux (the co-founder of StreamAlive) mapped out a workshop deck of 39 slides in PowerPoint.

Can you spot the talking vs listening slides?

Nothing unusual in that.

Only, in this deck, just 11 slides were purely presenter-led.

The rest (28 of them) were going to be written in real time by the audience. That shift from “me talking” to “us building” matters more than you might think.

Why bother adding listening slides?

Decades of university-level research show that learners who actively engage via quizzes, discussion, polls, interaction retain more, pay more attention, and feel more invested.

In one study involving 703 students, embedding short quizzes inside online lectures (officially called “interpolated retrieval practice” in academia, but basically means asking people to recall what they learned before you move on) significantly improved learning outcomes, even under distracting conditions (they played tiktok videos 😂)

Another university experiment compared active-lecture formats against traditional lectures.

It might not surprise anyone that the students in the active version reported higher engagement, stronger attention, and in many cases scored better on post-tests.

But! It is worth repeating and reminding ourselves that one-way presentations don’t do any favors if you’re trying to hold an audience’s attention.

Participation also helps with knowledge retention as well. Trainers all know about the knowledge retention curve

Credit: https://elearningindustry.com/forgetting-curve-combat

Again, data backs up everyone’s suspicion: participation improves knowledge retention.

A long-standing study of “interactive lectures” (the mildest form of active learning) found that in most cases, interactive lecture groups outperformed traditional lecture groups on retention tests.

But there is some inertia and biases to overcome to create interactive presentations. In one study, most students self-reported that they learned best in smooth lectures with the professor teaching the whole time. But follow-up tests showed that they had learned more in interactive sessions, or interpolated retrieval practice, if you want to get scientific about it.

Source: “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom,” Louis Deslauriers, Logan S. McCarty, Kelly Miller, Kristina Callaghan, and Greg Kestin

“Actual learning and feeling of learning were strongly anticorrelated,”
Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom

What this means for your PPTs

When your slides become co-created with your audience, you’re leaning into what the education world knows works. Your slides are no longer a monologue. They’re scaffolding to invite active learner participation.

If we design slides that listen as much as they speak, we reduce passive consumption and increase ownership. Your audience helps build the narrative. They care more. They remember more.

Catch us on our social pages

If you haven’t already, check out our social media pages to stay updated on our quirky takes on the latest social media trends and the occasional piece of engagement-related advice.

All the best,

Peter and the StreamAlive team
100% human-written with ❤️