The average student sits through dozens of boring PowerPoint presentations in a given school year. 

If you’re a teacher or presenter, you have to go above and beyond to get the attention of students with a PowerPoint. 

Although many PowerPoint presentations are used as a crutch to compensate for poor lectures, PowerPoint can be an excellent way to support a lecture and keep students engaged.

In this post, we’ll cover the best tips to make sure you have an  engaging and memorable presentation for your students:

Use creative templates or your own template

A great way to start an engaging PowerPoint presentation is to use a creative template or use your own custom template. The last thing that students want to see is another standard PowerPoint theme presentation with black text.

If you use a creative template, it will help your PowerPoint to stand out and be more eye-catching for students. You can find free PowerPoint templates directly on PowerPoint or you can create your own custom PowerPoint template.

The theme you select will influence things like the PowerPoint background, font choices, and slide layout. Once you have selected a theme, be sure to preview how your PowerPoint will look with the different template options. If you don’t like the themes provided on PowerPoint, you can always create your own and you can customize each part of the presentation.

A good rule of thumb to use is to mimic the imagery of what you’re presenting. If you’re doing a history lecture on World War II, it’s best to use a template that’s suitable instead of something drastically different like a Barbie-themed template. 

You can explore the different templates available on PowerPoint by going to File>New>Select Personal/Custom Template.

Highlight main points

Students, especially younger students, are not going to remember everything in your PowerPoint presentation. Even if you have the best presentation and your students love it, it doesn’t mean much if they can’t remember the main points/lessons in the presentation. This is why it’s important to highlight and emphasize the important part(s) of your presentation.

Students will often need you to re-emphasize and highlight the main takeaways of any lesson. For example, if you are teaching them about creative efforts of marketing your app, you might want to showcase a few real-life examples from top app marketing companies which will get them close to better understanding this. With PowerPoint, you can highlight, bold, and underline key phrases or sentences to make sure your students remember what’s important. You can also use PowerPoint’s built-in highlighter tool to circle around key points on slides with images. This makes it much easier for your students to digest information and remember what’s important.

You can take a few minutes during the planning stage of your presentation to highlight what you want your students to learn. Although this isn’t technical or flashy, it’s an effective way for your students to retain the important knowledge they need to know.

PowerPoint Add Animation Feature

Incorporate animations and pictures

The last thing that students want to see in a presentation is a wall of text. Even if you’re presenting to high school or college students, remote workers, etc,  it’s important to mix things up and keep the presentation interesting. PowerPoint has a lot of great built-in animations that can help you do this. You can search for animations directly on PowerPoint or you can find them on Google by searching for a keyword and adding “animation” in your search.

One way to incorporate animations is to use them sparingly throughout the presentation. For example, if you’re presenting a list of items, you can have each item appear on the slide as you talk about it. You don’t need to add an image to each slide, but animations can be good to illustrate new concepts and lessons to students. If there is a picture or animation of something you’re presenting, make sure to include it in your presentation.

A good way to choose which animations to add in your presentation is to look at other PowerPoint presentations online. There’s a vast library of  PowerPoint presentations that you can use for inspiration. See what other people have done and try to find creative ways to incorporate animations into your presentation.

Add interactive elements in your presentation

In addition to animations, you can add interactive elements in your  PowerPoint presentation to keep students engaged. PowerPoint has a built-in poll feature that allows you to create a quick poll for your students. This is a great way to check for understanding and get feedback from your students. Using interactive features like quizzes, polls and questionnaires is a  great way to add an element of fun to your PowerPoint presentation and keep your students engaged.

Interactive elements are essential for younger students. Students in Pre-K to 5th grade need to be engaged in order to learn and PowerPoint is a great tool to help them learn and stay engaged. For students in those grades, it’s best to have many interactive elements throughout the presentation. A good rule of thumb to use is to add something interactive at least every three slides. This will help students understand the concepts being taught while capturing their attention.

Ask questions during your presentation

A great non-technical tip to really improve your PowerPoint presentation is to ask questions during your presentation. This is a great way to check for understanding and get your students engaged in the presentation. Most people who present on PowerPoint give a lecture filled with information and ask their audience if they have any questions. This approach is ineffective and often leads to bored and uninterested students.

Instead, try peppering your PowerPoint presentation with questions. You can ask a question after every few slides or after each main point. This will help you gauge understanding and keep your students engaged in the presentation. It’s also a great way to get feedback from your students about what they are learning.

PowerPoint also has a built-in Q&A feature that allows you to easily ask and answer questions from your students. You can also use this feature to take notes and ask questions during the presentation. This feature is helpful for many students because some are shy or they don’t want to ask questions in front of the class. With the use of the Q&A feature, students can ask questions anonymously and you can answer them directly in the PowerPoint presentation.

These PowerPoint tips are just a few you can use to make your PowerPoint presentations more engaging and interesting for your students. By using a variety of different templates, multimedia content and presentation techniques, you can easily create PowerPoint presentations that students will love. With a little practice and creativity, you can make PowerPoint presentations that are interactive, informative and fun. To learn more about how you can create interactive content and courses, check out this blog post. If you are having difficulty installing PowerPoint or Microsoft 365, on the other hand, we recommend speaking to an IT support company.