Some people are hand talkers. Their hands move and gesture in well-choreographed synchrony with their voice. The arms pump away, the wrists rotate on pinwheels, and the fingers waggle like the tails of young puppies … an interpretive dance that emphasizes the spoken word and drives home visceral feelings.

For the rest of us ophthalmologists, however, the hands main purpose outside of the operating room is to hold eyelids open during applanation, and only get “expressive” during confrontational field testing.

Hand movements and gestures can be an important component of expression and becomes even more relevant in front of large audiences. Nervous hands fiddling in your pockets or holding the podium in a death grip … hands can convey many unintentional expressions that you hadn’t intended.

Gestures can be powerful as well. Your hands can pound on the podium, plead to the heavens, and point accusingly at the sleepy resident in the back row.

Consider taking those hands out of action
Unless you’re a great speaker and good at “hand talking,” consider taking them out of action. You’ve got enough to worry about during your talk, to be concentrating on hand gestures. This means giving both your hands something to do.

I like to use a handheld microphone in one hand and a laser pointer in the other. This keeps me from inadvertently scratching myself and these “powerpoint weapons” give me a ‘false’ sense of security.

Some people (not me) love podiums. You can use these as bullet-proof bunkers to hide behind as you shoot your audience with facts. They can even … you guessed it … give you a place to rest your hands.

Careful with that laser!
The laser pointer is an efficient pointer but can be dangerous. Don’t point it into the eyes of your audience by mistake (this makes retina guys especially nervous). Also, that little red dot wobbling all over the screen is annoying and will magnify your nervous hand tremor for everyone in the room to see! Only use your laser when needed.

If the projection screen is low to the ground, consider walking up to it and pointing with your finger … this is much more dramatic use of those hands!

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Powerpoint is perfect for displaying text, but its real power is the ease at which you can insert photos into your ophthalmology slides. Images are much more interesting than text, so insert as many as you can find!

Where to find eye photos?
The first and best option is to take them yourself. Digital cameras have made ocular photography even easier and most clinics have at least a retinal camera. Many retinal cameras have a broad depth-of-focus and can take basic anterior segment photos if you focus them properly.

Also, many consumer home-cameras can match up to your slit-lamp eyepiece such that photos can be taken. This isn’t the highest quality solution, but can work for that quick snapshot.

Are all your best photos in slide format? You can purchase inexpensive slide-scanners for a little over 100 dollars to batch convert these into digital picture files. Also, many flat-bed scanners come with illuminated slide adapters for this purpose.

Online Sources
Alternately, you can find photos/videos online at atlas sites like the RedAtlas, Columbia Atlas, and RootAtlas. Possibly your best image source is through google image search. Keep in mind that other people’s photos are copyrighted, so be sure to read the terms of service and ask permission before using any photograph or diagram.

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If you want to really emerse your audience, hit them with powerpoint video! Motion pictures involve your audience in a way that static photos cannot. Video can make your case interesting, easier to understand, and full-motion cinema gives monocular clues that impart stereoscopic depth.

That being said, video capture, editing, and playback can be difficult.

Capturing Video
Though most of us have a video system hooked up to our surgical microscope, few have video capabilities in clinic, limiting your videos to surgical ones. If you have your own digital camera, you may want to experiment with your camera’s video setting. Most of the videos taken at RootAtlas.com were taken with an inexpensive digital camera set to movie mode.

Editing Video
You will also need to edit your video, as nobody wants to sit through your entire two-hour extracap surgery. If you don’t know how to edit movie files, you may want to invest some time to learn this skill. Non-linear video editing is easier than ever on personal computers and this is a useful hobby to apply to your home movie collection as well.

Video playback can also be a hassle.
Powerpoint handles video files in a funny way … unlike photographs, Powerpoint doesn’t actually “embed” your video into the ppt file. Instead, the program “links” to it. This makes transferring your presentation to another computer tricky as you need to copy the powerpoint file and the video files and maintain the relative file structure between them. Also, some computers are incapable of playing certain video formats without first installing special video codecs.

Despite these difficulties, video can be rewarding and looks great when you get it to work. Check out our site in further detail on video tips related to ophthalmology.

Sources for Eye Videos:

RootAtlas slitlamp videos
Collection of downloadable videos, primarily slit-lamp movies, ready to insert in powerpoint

Novel Shirley Wray collection
A great site for eye motility disorders. The site is organized a little funny, but you can get to the videos and download them in a number of formats. These videos show real people with EOM problems, so use the videos responsibly and for medical education purpose only.

Youtube
Wide variety of movies, most of poor quality. It will take you some work to get them into a format compatible with powerpoint.

Good Video Editors:

Moviemaker (free with windows)
Moviemaker is a simple video editor that comes with windows. It is capable, but can only really edit a few formats: the DV video off a camcorder and video files in the windows media video format. Check out our moviemaker help section on using this program.

Womble MPEG Video Wizard ($100)
Program designed for editing MPEG1 and MPEG2 video. Fastest and easiest if you use a hard-drive based camcorder or take video on a Sony camera (not camcorder) like we do. We use this every day. It can only handle mpeg video, so it has limited utility … but if it works for your video system, it’s awesome and very fast. They’ve a free month-long demo download to try it out.

Adobe Premiere Elements ($100)
A simplified version of Adobe premiere. This program can handle most video formats and export into any other format. It even produces DVDs with menus. Somewhat mind-boggling at first, it does come with a good instruction book and is worth learning. A little taxing on system resources so it won’t work well on an old computer.

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You’ve opened PowerPoint and you’re ready to design your first presentation. But how do you begin? There are a couple of approaches you could take, depending upon your temperament and design skills.

1. You could jump right in and start typing text, adding background colors, and experiment with your font colors and styles. (not recommended)
2. You could use a pre-configured template.

Unless you have great design skills, I recommend creating your first presentation using a pre-made template. Microsoft has done us a favor … they’ve hired a team of artists and graphic designers, people with experience with color-schemes and typography, to design a large collection of “template” styles. These templates come complete with backgrounds, pictures, and pre-chosen fonts and colors.

The quality of these pre-installed templates is actually pretty good, though some may need a little “tweaking” to look perfect. If you aren’t satisfied with the default templates, you can also find free templates online. There are also many websites out there selling professional-looking templates.

There are a couple of ways to apply a template. When you first open up a blank PowerPoint presentation, go over to the task pane and choose a template. If you can’t find the templates in the Task Pane, go up to the file menu and click [Format – Slide Design]

When you click on the template thumbnail, the style is applied to your slide. Actually, the template changes all your slides. If you only want the current slide to change, click the little arrow to the right of the template button and chose [apply to selected slides].

I recommend using a template when designing your first site. In fact, I “always” use templates, as this is the easiest way to make your PowerPoint show look professional. If you change your mind later, it’s always easy to switch to another template!

Why should you use PowerPoint? That’s a good question … and for many doctors, not really a ‘question’ at all, as PowerPoint is all pervasive.  Still, for many ophthalmologists, computerized lecturing is a novel idea.   Therefore, let’s answer a few important questions:

1. What is PowerPoint?
Basically, PowerPoint is a software package that allows you to create professional multimedia presentations. As opposed to the traditional presentation formats (such as slide projectors), PowerPoint has many of advantages:

• Many viewing options: You can view your presentation in many different places … on a computer monitor, LCD projector, and you can even export your show onto the web.
• Printing: You can easily print copies of your slides and hand them out to your audience. This is great for teachers and educators, and students like it because they don’t have to take as many notes.
• Fast updates: You can update and fix your presentation at a moments notice (even minutes before your live presentation). No need to run to Kinko’s to have new (and expensive) slides prepared

2. What else can PowerPoint do?
PowerPoint also allows you to insert multimedia elements that could never be duplicated with projector slides. Some of these include:

• Transitions: You can make fancy transitions between your slides.
• Animations: A great new addition to PowerPoint 2002 are animations that make your text and pictures zoom around the screen and jump into place.
• Audio/Video: You can insert audio/video (like the eye videos here at rootatlas) directly onto a presentation slide. This makes your presentation seamless as you no longer have to bring along a VHS or DVD player with you to display motion picture.

Overall, PowerPoint is a great program. It’s easy to learn, and is “required knowledge” for anyone who gives presentations. 

Here’s an easy tip to improve your ophthalmology powerpoints … use less words.

Now … as simple as this sounds, it’s not always intuitive. After all, you make your PowerPoint presentation on a computer. A computer has a keyboard, and keyboards are great for typing words. Thus, you should put lots of words in your Powerpoint!

Wrong!

Words are terrible and horrible things … especially when projected in large numbers on a wall in a dark, cavernous room full of doctors trying to stay awake. It may be tempting to take your outlined notes and paste them directly into your slides: after all, that’s instant high-yield content!

Don’t do it!

Instead, see if you can make your lecture without any words! Sprinkle in photos, videos, graphs, anything! We are fortunate that ophthalmology is a visual subspecialty with great anatomy. Take those photos and use them.

I personally average only seven words per slide, but I’m striving for less. You should, too.

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Medical lectures tend to be long. Very long. Sometimes hours and hours long. One of the skills that allowed us to succeed in ophthalmology is the ability to process volumous amounts of information …

… but it doesn’t mean we like it!

It’s your responsibility as “the guy talking” to digest and summarize your topic succinctly and logically. Break your lecture down to little bite-size morsels and don’t cram too much brain-food into one sitting.

A long lecture is a disservice to your audience. You’re presenting to a bright group of people. They can go online or hit journals for more details on any subject imaginable. Those doctors are listening to you for one thing: for an organized and condensed delivery of your ‘personal’ medical knowledge. They want it brief, organized, and they want you to impart a sense of “what’s really important.”

Don’t present every little detail … that’s the equivalent of reading a journal article out loud to a captive audience. That is not a high-yield way to learn!

But what can you do to keep it brief?

One method that works for me is to set goals. For example, try to make your lecture less than thirty minutes long. As your topics come together, you will likely find that 30 minutes is not enough time. Instead of talking faster, rewrite your outline, reconsider your purpose, or break down your presentation into separate lectures.

People have a hard time concentrating for more than 25 minutes, so if your “mega lecture” is big, plan on creating stretch or snack breaks at these intervals. You will find that when standing in front of a large crowd your adrenalin kicks in and your sense of timing goes to whack. To help your timing, have someone in the audience (with a watch) inform you when you’ve got five minutes left, or use an egg-timer.

Whatever it takes to keep it short!

The best presentation I’ve ever seen was only 18 minutes long. Keep things brief and your audience will appreciate it.

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