I've become more and more interested in visual design as it pertains to teaching. I see a lot of teachers new to using a SMARTboard creating long, text heavy slides in their lessons. For myself, I've started a collection of feeds in my reader called Visual Thinking and it's had a dramatic impact on my own slide design process.

If you watch TED Talks you may have noticed that the visuals used by speakers at this years conference are qualitatively superior to those used in the past. TED has hired Duarte Design and assigned each speaker a small stipend to have their visuals given a makeover by the folks at Duarte. You can really see it in the visuals used in these two talks:

Barry Schwartz: The real crisis? We stopped being wise

Here's the backstory to Barry's slide makeover.

Bruce Bueno de Masquita: Three predictions on the future of Iran, and the math to back it up

Here's the back story to Bruce's slide makeover. (Seems to be offline; wonder what happened? Here's the Google Cache of the page. You can also find it on my Shared Items page.)

The post ends with this:

Rules We Live By

  » Break apart big ideas into smaller bite-sized pieces.


  » Simplify the message (even when you’re talking about using game theory to predict the future!)


  » Give a message space to stand out and contrast to focus attention.


  » Use more visuals and less words.


  » Use clear, easy-to-read charts with simple shapes and colors to add texture and clarity.

If you're new to using an Interactive White Board (IWB) in your class I think this is an excellent list to use as a starting point for slide design. When designing slides for classroom instruction these are the ideas I use as guidelines. I'm working hard at evolving how I present information to my students daily. Particularly when teaching more conceptually difficult material.

This is how I introduced statistics the first time with the SMARTboard:

Applied Math 40S Slides Mar 12, 2007

View more presentations from dkuropatwa.

This is how I did it this year:

Applied 40S March 20, 2009

View more presentations from dkuropatwa.

There's still lots of room for improvement in that second set of slides above. I'd genuinely appreciate any suggestions you may have about improving this particular slide deck or my approach in general. Can you suggest a specific image that might fit nicely into this lesson?

I'm going to keep trying to increase my use of visual images and since SlideShare added the ability to embed YouTube videos in each slideshow I've been trying to have at least one instructional video inserted into every day's set of slides.

... not all, but many of them. What I really like about this set is that the fellow who puts them together often references and links to the source articles or research where the snippets are taken from.

If one of these images (all cc, I asked) strikes you in some way, follow the link back and copy it to the comments here maybe sharing what struck you. I'll start it off below.

I'm not sure if images will embed in the comments here (I'm testing this with my first comment below) but I've got apture installed on my blog so linking to the image should create a popup view of it when you hover over the link; like this.