Are Your Slides Too Cute? 3 Presentation Tips That Center Student Understanding

Nimah Gobir

MindShift

Mar 18, 2025

Summary for Educators Are Your Slides Too Cute? 3 Presentation Tips That Center Student Understanding
By Nimah Gobir | March 18, 2024

During the pandemic, Christina Scheffel, a high school English teacher from Delaware, found herself trying to engage students through increasingly decorative slide presentations. She used vibrant cactus-themed slides filled with emojis and graphics, aiming to bring joy into a stressful learning environment. While students were initially entertained, the effort backfired when one student admitted that the only thing they remembered from a lesson was the “cactuses on the slides.” This moment led Scheffel to reconsider her presentation style, emphasizing clarity and student understanding over aesthetics.

Scheffel's experience underscores a common issue in instructional design: when visual elements distract rather than support learning. At the 2024 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference, she offered three research-informed presentation tips to help educators create slides that prioritize learning goals.

1. Choose a Design That Works for Students

Scheffel stressed the importance of reducing cognitive load—the total amount of mental effort being used in working memory. Slides cluttered with GIFs, emojis, and irrelevant visuals increase this load, making it harder for students to focus on and retain important content. She recommended prioritizing essential information and placing it prominently in the foreground of slides.

Jeff Kilner, a technology integration specialist in Delaware, echoed this advice, noting that students better understand content when the most critical information is easy to identify. Teachers should also ensure slides are accessible by using readable fonts and checking contrast levels with digital tools to assist students with visual impairments or processing challenges.

2. Limit Text on Slides

Slides overloaded with text can overwhelm students, impairing both reading and listening comprehension. Scheffel noted that the human brain struggles to read and listen simultaneously—overloading the language-processing center diminishes learning effectiveness. Instead, she recommended chunking related information to reduce overload and help students store knowledge in long-term memory.

For hybrid or asynchronous settings, Scheffel advised using simplified slides in class, while posting more detailed versions or narrated video walkthroughs on platforms like Google Classroom or Canvas. This gives students the opportunity to review and process the material at their own pace outside of class.

3. Provide Multiple Forms of Media

Following the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principle of multiple means of representation, Scheffel encouraged educators to use varied media types—text, visuals, video, and audio—to reach diverse learners. She reminded teachers that no single form of content delivery suits all students and emphasized the value of incorporating captions, transcripts, and alternative formats into lesson planning.

Importantly, Scheffel clarified that removing all creativity isn’t necessary. Fun and visually engaging slides can still be effective in non-instructional moments, such as morning check-ins or community-building activities. However, for academic content, clarity and accessibility should be the priority. As she concluded, “Not every student is going to get thrown off by a wordy slide or a rogue cactus, but some are. We need to design with all of our students in mind.”

This thoughtful balance between engagement and effectiveness serves as a guiding framework for teachers navigating digital instruction.

Source: Gobir, N. (2024, March 18). Are Your Slides Too Cute? 3 Presentation Tips That Center Student Understanding. KQED MindShift. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/61858/are-your-slides-too-cute-3-pre...

Original Article

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Prepared with the assistance of AI software

OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT (4) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com