Presentations Training:
Presentation Skills Training: When is a Visual Aid Not a Visual Aid?

Why would you use a visual aid? The broad answer is "to support the learning." In fact, that's the answer to the question, "Why (do anything) in a training session?"

But more specifically:

- a visual aid can illustrate an idea or a concept in a different way to just explaining it in words - sometimes a visual is the only way to explain something (try describing how to tie your shoelaces in words and see how much sense it makes)
- figures and statistics can be shown much more clearly and concisely in visuals, e.g. pie charts and graphs
- visuals appeal to different parts of the brain than words
- some people are very strong visual learners, they take in information mainly through visual stimuli
- having said that, we're all visual learners to some extent, especially these days with DVDs and YouTube
- visuals can introduce humour, colour, variety

So why do so many people use "visual aids" which don't do any of these things? Why do people use PowerPoint slides (and it's usually PowerPoint) which just have words on? Why do so many people use a medium which could be so colourful, engaging, stimulating and powerful and do nothing with it except list bullet points?

One of the reasons (and don't get me started or we'll be here all day) is because they're not using the slides as visual aids at all, they're using them as their own notes.

I've seen it dozens of times. I've sat through endless training sessions where someone just wrote a presentation on PowerPoint and virtually read the session from the slides. I'm sure you've sat through the same thing. Rather than write out their own notes to keep by them, they basically project their notes onto the screen for everyone to look at. Then they call them "visual aids".

No, just because something is projected onto a wall doesn't make it a visual aid. Another reason some people do this is because they want to print out the slides as handouts for people to take away. So, again, they're not visual aids, they're handouts in slide form.

By all means, have notes to keep yourself on track. By all means, produce written handouts for people to take away. But don't put these on slides, project them onto a huge screen and pretend that they're visual aids. They're not. Visual aids have a completely different purpose to your own notes or handouts, you can't have one thing performing all three functions.

So, next time you're thinking about using these sort of slides in your training, ask yourself, "Who are these for? Will they actually help the learners or are they mainly for me to see where I'm going?" Because when is a visual aid not a visual aid? When it's really your own notes or a glorified handout. Learn to tell the difference - because the people you're training can!

Source: Alan Matthews link

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