"You Fill Up My Senses"

6 x 6, folks!!!

That is what I learned in room 0244...6 x 6.  This is the magic formula; PowerPoint text chunks should contain no more than six lines with six words per line.  Too much more distracts the eye, confounds one's concentration and attention span, diminishes one's encoding process, and so on.  Most of this seems pretty basic.  We get it presenter, don't overload your audience.  No superfluous words, images, decorations, whatever!

But, oh, the details!  I had no idea about the minutia of how you can overload somebody, the avenues for disengagement.  For instance, I had never considered the difference between using capital letters and lower case and its impact on audience focus.  For example, consider the difference between:

PLAY

and

play 

The capital "L" has the additional line at the bottom, whereas the lowercase "l" does not.  It never occurred to me that using uppercase letters might be more likely to distract audiences/readers.

You know what, forget this...

We just did this awesome activity that I want to use in my class.  The present showed us a series of images and each of us (in groups of 3) generated a progressive story for that image.  Jen, Kristen, and I told an awesome story!  The presenter mentioned that if you align the activity with the content and use humor (relevant humor) as often as possible, students are many times more likely to remember crucial information.