PowerPoint Pandemonium

During the PowerPoint presentations, I was particularly impressed with some of the presentation techniques people used. I really enjoyed Anna’s use of music and Jeff’s element of audience participation. Jeff had audience members read from the PowerPoint and gave us a chance to respond to material and interact with him. Also, I really liked how David integrated pictures of historical sites into his discussion of literature. The pictures made the subject matter seem much more relevant to students since it helped us to understand that these were real people and existed in real places.

The least engaging presentations I saw were the direct lecture formats, which I must admit I myself was guilty of myself. Using PowerPoint in class leads to a greater propensity to lecture more and fails to give way to many activities. At the same time, if PowerPoint is used dynamically to supplement lecture, it can add emotion and richness to the lecture and make it more interesting. Several individuals read off of their slides which I was not a fan of because it made it seem like they were unsure what they had written up there and also it made it difficult to hear since they were facing away from the audience.

After viewing other people’s presentations, I became much more aware of my shortcomings. I want to use PowerPoint not only in lecture formats but also to start discussions and activities. It can act as a great general outline for classroom time and serve to display directions or pictures having to do with the topic of the day. I think that PowerPoint’s are often misused and if we used them with greater efficacy, their usage could actually increase and add greatly to the content of a classroom. Over all, I did enjoy using PowerPoint. I really liked the advice the video we watched on PowerPoint gave us. It helped me to see how PowerPoint can be used to infuse a subject matter with emotion and to stimulate discussion. Slides should never be boring, overly wordy, or be read off of, but at the same time, using PowerPoint in the correct way can really add excitement to a classroom. In the end, the pros would include: excellent outline, great way to bring emotion in, fun use of colors/sounds/movies, appeal to visual learners. The cons would include: peoples propensity for misuse with inclusion of verbosity and poorly designed slides, less apt to integrate participation, becomes very direct instruction/lectury.