Welcome to EduTips, a side project of the CultopeticoGee podcast where I share one quick idea to make your teaching better.

This is Jennifer Gonzalez and I am your host.

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Today's EduTip is don't give out your slides.

Many teachers and other presenters, especially those who work with older students, give out copies of their slides as a supplement to a lecture or presentation.

This is usually a PowerPoint file, a Google Slides presentation, or maybe just a printout of the slides with space for notes beside each one.

This practice has been around for generations. It's easy to do, students have come to expect it, and my guess is in some spaces you would be criticized for not doing it.

So why would I advise you to stop? First off, let me just say that I think it's pedagogically sound practice to give students some sort of scaffold for note-taking.

Guided notes have strong research support, so I'm not arguing that students should be totally on their own when it comes to taking lecture notes.

But just giving out your actual slide presentation isn't the best approach, and the reason comes down more to the teaching and not the note-taking.

The practice of giving out your slides often leads to terrible slides and consequently terrible lectures.

The only reason slides on their own without the presenter would be useful as a resource is if they contained a lot of text, text that pretty thoroughly explained the content of the lectures.

And a lecture made up of slide after slide full of text is torture for any audience. Slides built for an engaging, dynamic lecture will contain just enough text to provide structure to the lecture, to help the presenter and the audience keep track of how the parts fit into the whole and to show in writing key terms and ideas.

They should also contain lots of graphics that illustrate relationships between ideas and other visuals that deepen the learner's understanding.

But the slides should not explain the ideas. That's what the presenter does. If the slide explains everything, then the presenter's only job is to read the slide out loud, and doing that will bore your audience to tears.

In episode 129 of the podcast, I go way more in depth on this topic, exploring some solid principles for creating really effective slideshows. So if you want to explore this topic more fully, head over there next.

Now, if you still want to give your students some kind of structured note-taking tool or summary of the contents of your lecture, which is a very good idea, a much more useful alternative is a handout.

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