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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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?

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.

Sounds great to me.

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

>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.

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