Thought you didn't like Powerpoint?

[Guest]

I thought I didn't like PowerPoint until I read THIS GUY

"Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something."

Is anyone prepared to take up the baton for Powerpoint as a valid educational tool?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

[John Simkin]

I thought I didn't like PowerPoint until I read THIS GUY

"Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something."

Is anyone prepared to take up the baton for Powerpoint as a valid educational tool?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Good article. I only teach adults now and I sometimes use powerpoint. It is very good for bringing up photographs to illustrate what you are saying. It is also useful for putting up details of a book or some other fact that the audience might want to write down.

The thing that I do not like about powerpoint is when the teacher uses it to display the text of what he or she is saying. When this happens I invariably stop reading and listening. This is just lazy teaching and very poor communicating. If teachers are training young people to do this, then they should be ashamed of themselves.

[Guest]

Good article. I only teach adults now and I sometimes use powerpoint. It is very good for bringing up photographs to illustrate what you are saying. It is also useful for putting up details of a book or some other fact that the audience might want to write down.

It is also quite good to get students to download a ppt of pictorial sources you have just been discussing as a class and then get them to add slide notes to each slide or respond to preset questions. This way, if done properly, you might get the students using higher thinking skills.

[Maggie Thomas]

Power-point is a powerful tool but when teachers are observed by inspectors it is sometimes used, to teach through, rather than to enrich the lesson.

The worse example I have ever seen is when a teacher read the text of his lesson from the Powerpoint, students conscientiously copied the text, and if that was were not enough, students were then handed out a copy of the presentation .To the inspector this demonstrates both lack of confidence and poor communication skills.

However when power point is used properly e.g. to pull down examples of ethical advertising from the internet ,or to show a graph of the movement in house prices during the last 20 years, or as a modelling exercise in a cash flow document, then it works well to increase the interest of students and encourage debate and discussion.