Is Your Own PowerPoint Quality Really Meaningless? (Group Project)

• Graphics and little writing should be included.
• Too much writing on a slide is not good to use in a presentation.
• Good PowerPoint is with only images and the spoken text in your head.
• Adding text will lower the PowerPoint quality.
• Adding text and taking away the graphics will make your presentation even worse.
• Spoken word and images alone result in the most effective learning experience.

What Do I Think Of PowerPoint?

I think PowerPoint is only sometimes used in a good manner. Personally if a class is based purely on a PowerPoint presentation I easily lose track and start staring at the screen without finding a meaning in it. However it can be used well for some things such as quizzes for instance. PowerPoint allows you to relate every little piece of media and even the color of your presentation to the subject it relates to. I would probably keep everything that PowerPoint has to offer and not change much because I don’t think it’s the software that can limit your teaching in class but its how you present it. A bunch of pictures with two hours of talking is boring. Though reading off a screen for the same amount of time can also bore the classroom. I have witnessed how PowerPoint can limit the way teachers present to you but then again I have seen a lot of good teaching come from it. If I was teaching a class I would be structure my presentation very carefully and present it to myself to make sure that it can be learned from. I would probably add little or not animation and keep everything short. I’d probably only use PowerPoint for a very limited detailed part of a subject because PowerPoint is too simple to cover the whole thing. Id would definitely put media in it and label it so the students are aware of what they are looking at. To me the presentation should also not have too much color and movement. A simple but well presented presentation can keep the students focused on the information and can’t keep them staring at all the movement happening on the screen. I would definitely use PowerPoint if I was presenting on a location or on a product. To me though, PowerPoint has shown its qualities in tutorials. It is very good software to use when teaching things step by step.

Still, PowerPoint

The two texts pick up and continue the two earlier ones in some sort of fashion because one is against and the other is for PowerPoint, they are like a detailed extension of why or why not we should use PowerPoint. The first text states that digital technology can only enhance student learning if the technologies capacities can actually affect teaching to make it better for students to understand. This is not the case with PowerPoint but at stead electronic communication has great potential to enhance our learning. The author of the text is a teacher that wants his students to apply what they learn to their lives and he identifies several characteristics that are very pedagogical in contributing to meet his goals for teaching. Among these are: Courses should focus on learning rather than teaching, Interaction with the material should be student-controlled rather than teacher controlled, content delivery should be based on student knowledge, driven by frequent formative feedback, courses should be structured so that students interact with material in a pedagogically sound way and it should all be done in the most parsimonious way. The author compares how PowerPoint and electronic communication can help him achieve these five goals. Electronic communication is controlled by the students. Students can interact with the material when and where they want. This helps them to interact with each other regarding what they’re learning and they have more time to spend on their work. PowerPoint in the other hand is more teacher-controlled and cannot be affected by the students. It denies interaction between students and teacher in class because they are all staring at a screen. If a student didn’t catch something then he missed the slide and will have to wait until next class period. The author states that when PowerPoint is used in class it doesn’t necessarily make you bad but it shows that you are more concentrated on the quality of your presentation rather than student learning. The other text tells us how to love PowerPoint. PowerPoint is cheap, easy to use and is very limited. However we live in a world where convenience in price beats quality in every case. The content in PowerPoint is in the medium itself because it is easy to pick up things in the simplest manners such as through pictures and videos. The Author shows some laziness in stating that the application is good because it can be run by itself. Even without text there can be a lot learned.

PowerPoint- Evil or Not?

PowerPoint evil? That’s possible. Tom Rocklin states that PowerPoint does nothing to make sure the people you are showing a presentation to are actually filtering the information. He says that it encourages to passively absorb information by just looking at slides with the possible chance of not even reading them. Tom Creed tells us that PowerPoint makes you concentrate much more on presenting your work well at stead of actually helping others to learn from it. The other text suggests that PowerPoint is pedagogically useful technology that helps to teach better. It’s useful and can be shown on overhead projectors if printed on transparent paper. A teacher from the second text states that PowerPoint is flexible and easy to use. The entertainment that PowerPoint can provide will keep the kids focused. If anyone in his class doesn’t understand the task it is easy to explain to him again and if the students need to look up some information again which will support them in doing their homework they can look on the web to find the PowerPoint presentation of today’s class. PowerPoint only requires to be organized once and never again. It is not a set of scribbled notes and neither can it be lost. PowerPoint also keeps the watchers focused on something so they don’t catch a glimpse of you staring at your notes every now and then. It can give others the feeling that you know fully what you are talking about. PowerPoint can include visuals which have also been proven to be very useful next to a short text to help understand better. Back to PowerPoint being evil though; it can be very disturbing to have the content of a presentation flashing red and zooming around all the time. It can show the relevance of a piece of information but can also distract very easily. If the audience is bored its usually not because of a decoration failure but because of a content failure. We come to the conclusion that PowerPoint is a very useful program that should enforce presentations but not substitute them. The misuse of powerpoint can lead to offending the audience.