Sound Files, PowerPoints and Nietzche
April 12, 2008 – 5:55 am
In the Instructor Development course that I teach, I stress the importance of using audio-visual aids to increase your students’ retention of information.
With a little practice and a good template, its fairly easy to turn out a good PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. Occasionally (please note that I even spelled ‘Occasionally’ with a capital ‘O’), you can enhance your presentation through the use of sounds. I’ll never forget when an instructor, who shall remain nameless, had an intern prepare the PowerPoint presentation for his criminal law course. The intern decided it would be cool to use the Star Trek door opening sound on all 200+ slides. Can you imagine what it was like to sit through 16 hours of criminal law instruction while anticipating the appearance of Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock with each change of the presentation’s slide?
Now that I have made my point about limiting the use of sound files in your presentations, let me help you find the sounds you need. Just surf on over to Soundsnap and you will find tons of useful sound files that you can download for free (as in beer). Most of the files are in .mp3 or .wav formats but there are also some .aiff files.
The operative word here is self-control so please don’t ‘Star Trek’ your students. By the way, my solution was to remove all of the sounds from the criminal law presentation. Like Nietzche said, “He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.” Check it out!
CLICK HERE: