How to avoid "Death by Power Point"

One of the topics we dealt with in one of our ECO lessons is Power Point presentations.
The teacher showed us a video (click here if you would like to see it ) about power point presentations. The presenter spoke about why presentations turn out to be very boring and how we can prevent it. It was very interesting and very funny. The most interesting thing about the video was that we all connected some points mentioned in the video by McMillan with power presentations we had to give or were given by other students or teachers. 

The thing is that I was surfing the net yesterday when I read this tweet:

["Death by powerpoint" is a term relating to the intense boredom/hatred of useless powerpoint presentations.]

At first, I thought it was a joke... or fake. So, I googled "Death by power point" thinking that nothing would come up. But to my surprise, it did! There's information about it on Wikipedia and many other sites:

“Death by PowerPoint” is a criticism of slide-based presentations referring to a state of boredom and fatigue induced by information overload during presentations such as those created by the Microsoft application PowerPoint"

So, I decided to make an entry on my blog about death by powerpoint and how we can "prevent it". I think it is very important to know how to avoid "dying by power point", because not knowing how to design a presentation appropriately can cause our presentations to pass by unnoticed and bore our audience.
I read many things (most of them very funny), so I decided to choose some of them to point out:
The thing that I would like to point out, is that people think that some of the factors contributing to this "phenomenon" are the lacks of:

1. Significance: why do we present? does the information have a clear meaning? 
2. Structure: are we presenting the information with good interesting arguments to support it and in a clear way? 
3. Simplicity: "Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler". This means we should not turn our power points into Word documents by putting a lot of text in one slide, for example. 
4. Rehearsal: If you think you don't need to rehearse a presentation, you are wrong. Many things that are part of our presentations have to be rehearsed, it will not work out completely the first time. 

I think that these factors are realistic and should be taken into account when we design a powerpoint or any other presentation (for example, a Prezi presentation). I haven't done so when I designed my presentations because I didn't know the things that I thought were good to include in a power point (the use of lot of texts, many bullet points, no pictures, etc.) were actually boring my audience. But now that I know how I can improve my designing of the presentations, I will start doing it. Since I am going to be a teacher, it is very important to know how to design effective and eye-catching powerpoint presentations, not only for my benefit (students will pay attention),but for their benefit too.

I also found an article from the North Carolina State University which is very interesting because it has some do's and dont's of powerpoint presentations designing. Click here if you would like to read it.
If you would like to read information of the factors contributing to death by power point you can click here.

See you next time!