PowerPoint can be used in classrooms and on the web in any number of scenarios. Serving as a tool for organizing a presentation as well as enhancing a learning experience with multimedia, PowerPoint can be used by all educators in order to help students to learn. While PowerPoint provides another option for learning, it can also present significant roadblocks as well as opportunities, of course.

As a multimedia application, PowerPoint presents the same issue as video and audio might: accessibility. PowerPoint in its’ purest form (text only) is usually accessible by most students, provided that they have the free PowerPoint reader or the PowerPoint application. When multimedia is added to the presentation, things can become much more complicated. Presentations that use multimedia require students to engage in downloading large files and sometimes present students with tasks with which they may be unfamiliar.

Solutions? Well, there are a few ways to make presentations that aren’t too bulky and that all students can use. The first thing to do is to think about how your students will use the presentation and then think about what might be the best way to present it. For instance, maybe all of your multimedia doesn’t need to be imbedded in the presentation. Instead, you could have links that bring them to files stored on your website. This way, the media is chunked into small pieces and allows the student to be able to download only what is necessary for the particular assignment.