Right, the use of text-heavy slides for distributing information is so infuriating. The slides should only be used for presentations. For reading, the material should be in a document format.
Oh god, please no hand-outs! Or at least, make them digital if so, students can waste paper on their own dime. One thing I hated as a student was getting reams of paper from a teacher. You can't search them, they are easy to lose, and they clutter up my nice neat notebooks like nothing else. A class syllabus is nice to have a hard-copy of because I would refer to it frequently, but that's about it.
I always loved hand outs, and they seemed the best way ever of complementing a good whiteboard lecture, but rarely had the chance to get them. They were great when provided before the course and had enough blank space on every page, because you could scribble all your notes over them, and make comments with arrows on what was on them, instead of having to take extensive notes on blank pieces of papers or notebooks (hated and never used them because I always liked to be able to reorder pages/sections and be able to more "random access" them).
Hand-outs are great for mind-drifting students who are too lazy to take extensive notes but are nevertheless genuinely interested in the subject :)
