But something like I saw and have just described is the end result of the work of many, many people over many, many months. It is not something you create at your own desk over a week-end in the summer. Presentation programs like Astound, Persuasion, and PowerPoint let you do from your computer what you may already be doing with transparencies and an overhead projector. But they all give you better color and clarity than handwritten transparencies. If you have access to a scanner you can add illustrations from the textbook your students are using or from any other source you like.
Simple animations spice up presentations, too.
While I talk about free fall, two objects of different size and mass fall beside my words and equations. While I talk about simple harmonic oscillators, a mass on the end of a spring simply oscillates. Simply sliding a title in from the side or doing a fade from one slide to another is a big improvement over my usual handwritten transparencies. Using something like this with the bright Barco projectors in Lumpkin Hall would be a delight. For most of us, it means connecting a computer to an LCD panel setting atop a high-intensity overhead projector.