Carlson POB

Electronic Classroom Presentations

A more powerful, but technologically demanding, lecture approach is to use one of several electronic presentation programs to create your lecture materials and then use a microcomputer and video-data projector to display the lecture. Software programs such as Microsoft's PowerPoint allow you to easily create lecture slides on a microcomputer. A simple slide might consist of a title and 3-4 text bullets. This type of slide can be used to create the lecture outline as well as to convey your lecture points.

Just as you might write down a series of points to be made in a lecture, so too can you create an outline of major points in PowerPoint. Each major point becomes a slide containing either bulleted text or a combination of bullets and a figure. An advantage of this electronic approach is that you can insert figures, artwork, and photos onto the slide. With access to a color scanner, figures and charts can be scanned into electronic files that can in turn be inserted into a slide. It is also possible to place sound clips and/or movie clips onto a slide for presentation in the classroom. This allows you to create your own slides using a combination of text bullets, clip art, figures (from Carlson or other sources), and photos.

Allyn and Bacon commissioned the creation of a set of slides entitled PowerPoint Presentations to Accompany Neil Carlson's Physiology of Behavior (6/e), Allyn and Bacon, 1997. The nineteen sets of PowerPoint lecture slides parallel the topics covered in each chapter of the textbook. The slides are primarily in a title and bulleted list format and will contain only a few examples of artwork and graphics. The intent is that the slides are a framework around which to create your own lectures. Section II contains detailed instructions on how to use these slides to create advanced slide lectures. You can either create your own lecture slides from the outset or add your own enhancements to the Carlson PowerPoint slides.