NUTSHELL NOTES

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at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

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Volume 3 Number 9

Visual Aids for Class Handouts and Presentations - 2: Black & White Overheads

Some professors like to simply use line drawings directly from a book or journal. If your copier can enlarge, this can sometimes be an option; by filling most of your 81/2 x 11 transparency plastic with the image, you can often produce a suitable overhead. On the other hand, book illustrations are not designed to be overheads; what works in a book may not work in your classroom. Traits of journal illustrations that produce disappointing results are fonts that are too small and lines that are too fine. Make your overhead on your local copy machine, try it in the room in which you teach and look at it from the back row and sides. If results are not what you wish, you may need to do some drawing yourself

If your subject is one that tends to lend itself to teaching with visuals, your office computer should probably include a graphing program such as Cricket Graph® for the Macintosh or Harvard Graphics® for the PC. It should also include a good Postscript® drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator®. With a graphics program, you can often input data from a journal and quickly produce your own graphic that will make a good overhead (Figure 1). The figure took only 15 minutes to produce in Adobe Illustrator®. It is in Postscript®, so the single piece of artwork can be used for both overheads and handouts because it will remain sharp and clear when scaled at any size.

Many disciplines have sources of clip art and fonts that are pertinent to a subject, such as a periodic table for chemists or mathematics symbols for engineers. Clip-art outline maps are also worth owning. You need not then draw any map; just cut out the part you need, put your data onto it and print your overheads and handouts

Everyday Sources of Radiation

Figure 1. Pie-chart overhead produced from journal data.

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