Spotlight
Beyond Bullets: Designing More Effective Slides  

Are you tired of using bullet points in PowerPoint slides? Would you like to know how you can make your slides more interesting and easier to understand, with or without bullets? Would you like help learning to do that on your OWN computer? Then read on.

OMERAD is presenting a one-hour lecture titled Beyond Bullet Points: Designing More Effective Slides. Dr. Stephen Yelon, professor emeritus, will explain how to design slides to help students learn what is being taught. This includes how to use animation to direct attention, ease reading and facilitate understanding. A question-and-answer session will be held after the lecture. You may then leave, or stay for a hands-on workshop.

For one hour after the lecture OMERAD faculty and staff will conduct a hands-on workshop where you will learn how to use animation in PowerPoint to:

• Build a bullet list, so that the bullet points appear when you talk about them
• Dim bullet points you have already talked about 
• Add shapes and text to a slide already on the screen
• Reveal parts of a graph when you want to talk about them
• Make parts of a slide disappear
• Have a shape follow a motion path

Part of the problem with hands-on workshops is that you may have to learn on a version of PowerPoint that is not the same as yours. But not this time! This time you may bring your own laptop computer to the workshop, and learn on that. You may even bring your own slides to practice on.

When does all this excitement happen, you ask? And how much does it cost? Read on.

DATE:      Monday, February 21

TIME:       Lecture 4:00 - 5:00 pm

                Hands-on Workshop 5:00 - 6:00 pm

PLACE:     E-4 Fee Hall

WHO:      CHM Faculty & Staff

COST:       Free; registration required

Hands-On Workshop Requirements: If you are planning on attending the workshop, you must already have basic PowerPoint skills. You must also bring your own laptop computer with PowerPoint installed. This laptop may be a PC or Mac.

Registration: To register, send an email to [email protected] indicating whether you want to register for just the lecture or both the lecture and the workshop. Seating is limited to 20.

B-CLR

YouTube: Video-Sharing for Education 

You have seen videos on the Internet, from silly dances to creative online documentaries to awesome Super Bowl commercials going viral; chances are you have watched these on YouTube. The online experience continues to evolve dramatically and today's students are tech savvy and use computers, Internet, social networks and online sharing tools almost every day to interact with family, friends and peers.

The proliferation of video-sharing on the Internet can also be used with an educational focus. Any faculty or student with a basic video camera and a high-speed Internet connection can-in a matter of minutes-create, edit, upload and share a video to YouTube. 

A number of MSU faculty and students are already using YouTube to take advantage of this free video-sharing service in their courses.  Short pertinent videos found on the Internet or created can be posted by faculty to help illustrate concepts and motivate reflection. Students can also record videos and post them as part of a class assignment to solicit feedback from the professor and class peers. See MSU Prof. McGreal's 2010 Best Blended Course Award of Excellence for a look at the use of video in her course.

Faculty and students wanting to use YouTube to post their own videos or to make a comment must register with the site (youtube.com) and create a profile. Faculty who set up a YouTube account for a course can create a course "channel" to which students may subscribe. A course profile can be public or private. If you set up a private profile, then all videos in that profile would be accessible to only specific contact lists created by you.  Links to the videos can be stored in the school learning management system (such as Angel) with access limited to that class.

To learn more about video-sharing on the Web and YouTube, see the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative article 7 Things you should know about YouTube.

B-CLR offers free instructional design consultations to CHM faculty needing help with blended and online curricular materials. To find out more about B-CLR  services, visit  the B-CLR webpage. To see a list of CHM faculty projects completed by B-CLR, visit the showcase.

Geraud Plantegenest

B-CLR Manager. 

email: [email protected] 

Recently the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care released a new tool, Med School Mapper; this tool provides information about the extent to which medical schools enhance primary care services, both regionally and nationally.  The mapper tool is built upon the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile data and uses geo-coding to locate physicians by county. The Robert Graham Center is sponsored by the American Academy of Family Physicians and was established to provide policymakers, legislators and educators a primary care perspective to discussion of health policy.

Part of the impetus for the development of this tool was the recommendation to expand number of medical student trainees, with little mention and measurement of how the significant resources needed to achieve this training goal would help meet the needs of the population.  AAFP was funded by the Macy Foundation to support development of this tool, which would help state policymakers by providing information about their own regional social and health care access needs.  Given the relatively few existing tools to help policy makers understand the local and regional impact of medical schools, the Robert Graham Center has been developing resources to help inform decision-making.

Map 1 below shows the location, by county, of CHM graduates practicing within Michigan.  This footprint of counties shaded in red represents 75% of our graduates practicing in-state.  Since no medical school expects that 100% of its graduates will completely fulfill the specific mission of the school, 75% represents a reasonable estimate of the core service area of a medical school.  If a standard of 100% of graduates was used, all but 12 counties in Michigan would be shaded red in the map below. Even with the 75% standard, CHM graduates practice in over half of the counties in Michigan.   

Map 2 shows CHM graduates as a proportion of the total population by county, with darker blue representing a higher penetration rate within the county.

Click here to enlarge

Other information about our graduates:

            Practicing in rural areas: 14%

            Practicing in HPSA/MUA: 37%

            Primary care practice: 46%

            Practicing in low income area: 58%

Map 3 below illustrates the footprint of CHM from a national perspective.  This map includes 100% of CHM graduates. 

Click here to enlarge

Have you ever been working on your computer and gotten stuck? You know Microsoft Word can do what you want to do but you don't know how to do it. Well, help is just a click away.

MSU recently contracted with a premiere online training service called lynda.com. This service offers more than 900 self-paced courses on every software application from Microsoft, Adobe and more. It also provides focused training on subjects like multimedia production, web development and programming. New training materials are added every week.

The training modules are presented by enthusiastic instructors with knowledge and real-world experience in their areas of expertise. Instruction is presented in brief movies (a minute or two) so you can learn a specific task, such as setting up tabs or performing a mail merge, without needing to work through the entire course. Files used in the tutorials are available for download so you can practice along with the instructor.

Access is available to all faculty and staff for free. You must go through MSU's online training portal at http://train.msu.edu/lynda then log on using your MSU NetID and password.

So the next time you need immediate help with Microsoft Word, Excel, Acrobat Pro, etc., turn to lynda.com for fast answers.