Narrated slides for lessons and training

Narrated slides teach well when the voice explains each slide instead of reading it, something on screen points at the part being discussed, and each lesson is short enough to finish. Most teachers and trainers already have the slides. The hard part is the narration.

Why turn slides into a narrated lesson?

Because the deck is where the knowledge already lives. A lecture, an induction, a product update or a compliance module usually exists as slides, and the people who need it weren’t in the room: new starters, students who were absent, a shift that works nights, a team in another country.

A deck without its presenter rarely works on its own. Bullet points were written to be talked over. Narration turns them back into a lesson.

How do people narrate slides today?

Most record themselves. PowerPoint can record narration slide by slide, show your notes in a teleprompter view while you speak, and export the result as a video. Our guide to turning a PowerPoint into a video walks through it.

It works, but it costs time. Every stumble means another take, and PowerPoint doesn’t record during slide transitions, so you learn to pause. When a slide changes next quarter, its narration has to be recorded again, in a voice that matches the rest. A second language means recording the whole deck again, if you speak it at all.

What does the research say about narrated slides?

Quite a lot, and most of it is good news for narration done well.

Speak, don’t make people read. In Paul Ginns’s meta-analysis of the modality effect, 43 experimental effects supported explaining a visual with spoken words rather than printed text, especially when the lesson runs at a set pace, as a video does.

Point at what you’re talking about. Highlights, arrows and pointers are what researchers call signals. Sascha Schneider and colleagues’ meta-analysis of 103 studies with 12,201 participants found that signals improved both retention and transfer and reduced mental effort. An overview of 29 meta-analytic reviews put signaling among the design choices with the largest benefits, and found that good design matters more in lessons that play at a set pace, like lectures and videos, than in ones learners move through themselves.

Keep it short and keep it moving. In 6.9 million edX viewing sessions, Philip Guo and colleagues found that median engagement was at most six minutes, and that slides alone held attention less well than slides mixed with the instructor’s face or tutorials drawn by hand. Their advice when slides must be shown was to add emphasis by marking up the slides as you speak.

A good synthetic voice is no longer a handicap. In randomized studies by Scotty Craig and Noah Schroeder (2017 and 2019), learners taught by a modern text-to-speech voice did about as well as those taught by a recorded human voice, while an older synthetic voice did worse.

And caption it. Captions help everyone follow along, and captions for prerecorded video are a Level A requirement in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

What makes narrated slides work?

Put together, the research and everyday practice point to five habits:

• Explain, don’t read. Say what the slide means and why it matters; the words are already on screen.
• Point at what you’re saying, so eyes are in the right place at the right moment.
• One idea per slide, with fewer words on it. The narration can carry the detail.
• Short videos. Split a 40-slide deck into lessons of a few minutes each.
• Notes written for the ear. Short sentences, real examples, and the terms your learners will meet on the job or in the exam.

How do you write speaker notes that narrate well?

Notes written to jog your memory don’t sound right read aloud. Notes written to be heard do. A few rules:

• Write one block for each slide, and start it with the slide’s number (“Slide 3:”) so it is clear where each block belongs.
• Say what the slide means, then point to the evidence on it. “Most returns come from one mistake. You can see it in the second column.”
• Write numbers the way you would say them, and spell out abbreviations the first time they appear.
• Leave out stage directions such as “next slide” or “as you can see”; a pointer does that work better.
• Aim for 20 to 40 seconds a slide. At a presenting pace of about 150 words a minute, that is 50 to 100 words. A title slide needs a sentence; a dense chart may need more.

What does the Slides to lesson skill do?

We make Chasca, so take our part of this with that in mind. We built the Slides to lesson skill for teachers, lecturers, trainers and L&D teams who have the deck and want the lesson without recording it.

• Add your slides, as a PDF of the deck or as pictures, up to 40. From PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides, export a PDF first.
• Choose how it’s narrated. “Write it from my slides” reads the text, charts and pictures on every slide and says what each one means, without adding facts that aren’t there. “My notes, word for word” reads your speaker notes exactly as written: paste them in, one block per slide, and any slide without notes gets a sentence or two in the same voice.
• A highlight and a pointer move to each part of the slide as it is named, with a gentle push-in on small details.
• Your slides stay exactly as they are, with your fonts, colors and logos.
• The length follows your deck, at 6 to 45 seconds a slide, from one minute up to 30 minutes on paid plans.

Lessons are 16:9, with subtitles and narration in any of the 79 languages Chasca supports, read by one of our narrators or by your own custom voice.

What won’t it do?

• It won’t change your slides. A crowded slide stays crowded, so trim it before you export.
• It won’t add facts that aren’t on your slides or in what you type.
• It won’t play slide animations. A PDF shows each slide in its finished state.
• It won’t put you on camera. If your learners respond to a face, record a short personal introduction yourself.

How do you make one?

1. Export your deck as a PDF.
2. Open the Slides to lesson skill and add the PDF. Paste your speaker notes, one block per slide, and choose “My notes, word for word”, or leave the box empty and choose “Write it from my slides”.
3. Choose the language and the voice. The deck sets the length.
4. Watch it with your slides open, then share it with captions on and a question for learners to answer.

Your first two videos are free, up to a minute each, watermarked and with no card needed. After that, plans start at $9.99 a month; see pricing.

Sources

• Microsoft Support. Record your presentation.
• Ginns, P. (2005). Meta-analysis of the modality effect. Learning and Instruction, 15(4), 313–331.
• Schneider, S., Beege, M., Nebel, S., & Rey, G. D. (2018). A meta-analysis of how signaling affects learning with media. Educational Research Review, 23, 1–24.
• Noetel, M., Griffith, S., Delaney, O., Harris, N. R., Sanders, T., Parker, P., del Pozo Cruz, B., & Lonsdale, C. (2022). Multimedia design for learning: An overview of reviews with meta-meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 92(3), 413–454.
• Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Learning at Scale.
• Craig, S. D., & Schroeder, N. L. (2017). Reconsidering the voice effect when learning from a virtual human. Computers & Education, 114, 193–205.
• Craig, S. D., & Schroeder, N. L. (2019). Text-to-speech software and learning: Investigating the relevancy of the voice effect. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 57(6), 1534–1548.
• W3C. Understanding Success Criterion 1.2.2: Captions (Prerecorded). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2.