On starting my career as a teacher, one thing that stood out to me immediately was the importance placed on the powerpoint presentations. These files in some situations had been passed down for years through various teachers who would occasionally add a slide or two of their own work. For a lot of teachers this was all they needed to teach their class.

However on looking into my own classes I discovered a problem. My degree's classes had scattered powerpoint presentations. From week to week they would be created by different teachers, using different templates and were occasionally missing altogether. I continued to bumble through the trimester, re-purposing what I could in the brief time I had in-between classes. This led me to a system that had all the content required, but there was a lack of cohesion between the lessons and was not my content.

So I spent a good two weeks, 8 hours a day, writing new slides. These new slides had a focus on large images and had a cohesive design throughout the different classes, giving the whole degree a cohesion it didn't have before. I expected this to just make things a bit nicer, but it ended up with a couple of extra points I didn't expect:

• After re-writing all the content to my 'voice', teaching suddenly became a lot smoother. I was no longer thrown off by the wording not matching my personal patterns, and therefore I didn't need to read the slides as hard as I was before. This generally made my classes feel more intimate and less pure information dump.
• Being able to re-write the classes meant I could insert breakpoints properly. When I say breakpoints I mean sections that are created in order to break the tension and boredom that otherwise wells up over time. By use of the occasional joke slide, slide dedicated to giving an example that happens to be comical, or simply huge picture based slide, I am able to work on the attention of some of my students that have problems with it.
• History lessons are suddenly interesting. By a clever use of very specific animations I am able to create dynamic and interesting image animations, which can be timed to match the story I am giving. This presents an almost magical manifestation of the story, while also showing the students that I am willing to put the time into working on making lectures better.