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> Young whippersnappers don't seem to know how to take notes--so going with no slides is tough. Students cannot go back and review the lecture to make sure they understood key points.

If you're going to go to the effort of planning a verbal (i.e. text) lecture, and then re-encoding it as slideshow, all for the purpose of getting students something to review... why not just write down your plan for the lecture--a transcript of what you're going to say--and then email it to the students?

In fact, ideally, do this before the lecture. That way, many of the students will have already read through it once, and will be able to ask more thoughtful questions.

Sounds great to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_teaching

This was going to be my suggestion. Powerpoints really don't make sense outside of a presentation context.
Writing an approximate script of the lecture will aid in preparation, and then pairing it down into slides will help you find the beats you want to emphasize.
At the end, you'll be left with an improved presentation, and good material to distribute to students who miss the presentation.

The original presentation was in fact pretty comprehensible, but it was about presentations (and thus relied upon all the cheesy cliche accoutrement of presentation software), and done with the shortcomings of the medium in mind.

>In fact, ideally, do this before the lecture. That way, many of the students will have already read through it once, and will be able to ask more thoughtful questions.

"many" is an overestimate.

> That way, many of the students will have already read through it once, and will be able to ask more thoughtful questions.

You haven't taught before, have you? :) I'm only slightly kidding. I would love to have students engage with the material before class. I typically assign readings that introduce key concepts, then cover those concepts from a different angle in class to give students an incentive to 1) read before class, and 2) actually show up to class. Based on scores from ridiculously easy pop quizzes about the readings, its seems that a minority of students do even the assigned readings; I doubt many but a select few would review an entire transcript of a class before attending.

But it's something worth trying, at least, so thank you for the suggestion.

Why are you teaching a class for students who don't want to learn the material?

One of my more favorite professors would provide his slides, they were typically quite minimalist, and also provide the 2-3page long bullet-points of lecture notes that he would use to fill in the slides. The key thing here was he would post the lecture notes after the actual lecture, so you get the active learning from writing notes during the lecture with a searchable, easily savable/transportable copy of the actual content

That's what I do currently. My slides are very sparse, but on the screen of my laptop I have my notes about what's going on at that point in the lecture. Once the lecture's done I upload the whole shebang (double-wide PDF pages with the slide on one side and my notes on the other) for the students to read afterwards.

I'm sure you're students appreciate it, even if they don't now they will later.

> review the material in preparation for an exam

Have you thought about getting rid of exams? Honest question.

I had a few progressive professors in college that completely ditched exams and went with either in person exams (think office hours with PG) or all participation and projects. I learned more from those classes than any class I took in all 4 years.

I know this style doesn't lend itself useful to all subjects but I feel that the academic community needs a massive overhaul in how it tests knowledge retention.

My first year Computer Science classes had 500+ people in them. Some things, like in person exams, don't scale. Having said that, for smaller groups it probably works a lot better in some cases. I believe the medical field does it.

And I thought 200 was big.

Powerpoint allows you to put text in the "lecture notes" section. This doesn't get presented, but you can view it with the file. Win-Win

Have you thought of hand-outs to supplement your lectures?

Oh god, please no hand-outs! Or at least, make them digital if so, students can waste paper on their own dime. One thing I hated as a student was getting reams of paper from a teacher. You can't search them, they are easy to lose, and they clutter up my nice neat notebooks like nothing else. A class syllabus is nice to have a hard-copy of because I would refer to it frequently, but that's about it.

I always loved hand outs, and they seemed the best way ever of complementing a good whiteboard lecture, but rarely had the chance to get them. They were great when provided before the course and had enough blank space on every page, because you could scribble all your notes over them, and make comments with arrows on what was on them, instead of having to take extensive notes on blank pieces of papers or notebooks (hated and never used them because I always liked to be able to reorder pages/sections and be able to more "random access" them).

Hand-outs are great for mind-drifting students who are too lazy to take extensive notes but are nevertheless genuinely interested in the subject :)

I get handouts for every lesson at my college. I scan them and give them back next week.

Right, the use of text-heavy slides for distributing information is so infuriating. The slides should only be used for presentations. For reading, the material should be in a document format.