I was honoured to have been asked to give a presentation at ResearchEd Scotland at Dollar Academy.

The focus of my talk was a call to teachers to reduce the complexity and visual clutter in the materials that we use to teach/present to our pupils and peers.

This comes from a frustration at the seemingly endless dumping of text and random images on slides and pages to the detriment of effective communication. To me these things form a barrier to learning and are fundamentally a waste of the precious time needed for teaching and learning.

I wanted to point to the mistakes I have seen so many times and well as show why they matter. Most importantly I wanted to give people some ideas for how to do better.

For my talk I drew upon a wide variety of influences not least of which is Daniel Higginbotham’s excellent site http://www.visualmess.com

You can view my slides here: https://www.slideshare.net/robfmac/clean-up-your-mess-177488664

A pdf copy that includes my presenter notes is linked below:

I intend to flesh out my notes to form a full blog post over the next few weeks.