PowerPoint: Zzzzzzzzzzz

Do teachers really have time to

• find fabulous and ever-changing technology tools
• get across the tools’ technical specs and genuine pedagogical possibilities
• develop meaningful and student-centred lessons around them

without working until the wee hours every night? I don’t function well on less than a good eight hours sleep.

If we accept the theory that the use of verbal and visual communication, rather than just one mode or the other, leads to increased student engagement and higher levels of student cognition, then what is wrong with at least falling back on the pedestrian PowerPoint?

Oh yeah, that's right - there are better presentation tools. Prezi, for example, is beautiful, playful, and fresh. (I might review it next week…) But it takes longer to create, all that fiddling about with the ‘Edit’ function and fonts, and being forced to make time-consuming (=meaningful) decisions about the interconnectedness of your presentation, the hierarchy of your points, and so on.

If you’re out of time for labours of love, and you really need that sleep, but you want to boost your class discussion, then pulling together a few PowerPoint slides is still a good baseline.

How to do it well…

I have scanned the web for some top tips that might apply to the secondary classroom (most sites talk to corporate America). I came across a site belonging to Dave

who writes professionally on slideshow presentations (the new job market). He has polled thousands of people since 2003 using his ‘What annoys you about bad PowerPoint presentations?’ survey and says the overwhelming response indicates: Audiences are fed up with presenters who fill their slides with too much content and are then compelled to read it all to those seated in the room.

Brilliant for its sheer obviousness.

Taking Dave’s advice, I thought it might be interesting, calling upon some of the ideas in my earlier posting ‘The Word’, to create slideshows that

ONLY USE ONE WORD OR A SINGLE IMAGE SANS TEXT PER SLIDE

as a backup to class discussion. Students' attention would not be pulled in two directions: reading the text while also trying to listen to me. I would not be lecturing to them with a wall of text. 


A well-selected image would enhance their cognitive processing and a single word could foreground a key concept. And I could create my slideshow at the traffic lights, over breakfast, at recess, or in the wee hours if the urge arose - but just for five minutes. M