Is PowerPoint in the Classroom ‘Evil’? By KATHERINE SCHULTEN Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises … 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. –Edward Tufte, “PowerPoint is Evil” Later today we’ll publish a lesson about the use of PowerPoint in the classroom, inspired by the much-e-mailed article, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.” As we were writing the lesson, we tweeted a question for teachers, “Do you use PowerPoint in the classroom? How?” Monica Poole, an Assistant Professor of History and Social Sciences and Learning Communities at Bunker Hill Community College, wrote us back immediately, responding to the Tufte quote above with thoughts about when and how she uses PowerPoint — and when and how she doesn’t. Is PowerPoint “evil”? If PowerPoint is the only communication tool we’re teaching our students — at any level — we have a serious problem. The same is true if PowerPoint is the only teaching tool we use to impart information to our students. If we are choosing any communication genre or tool to the absolute exclusion of others, we have a problem. If, however, PowerPoint is simply one of many tools, that’s an entirely different matter. If we’re teaching our students a wide variety of skills — extemporaneous oral presentations without visuals, prepared memorized speeches, persuasive essays, blog posts, biographies, one-minute-pitches, eulogies, wholly-visual media (photos, drawings), journalistic reporting, narrative writing, fiction writing, oral debate and planned oral presentations with PowerPoint or other similar aids, then we’re doing a good job. I’m not at all persuaded that PowerPoint works if one is silently clicking through slides–for that, I might prefer a tool like Prezi, or, more likely, I’d prefer a more traditional written document. PowerPoint can be a fine support for an oral presentation, or to show charts, graphs, images, blocks of text and bullet points, but it doesn’t do well as a one-man show. Join the discussion, below, to tell us what presentation tools you use and why. Here are some ideas and tools Ms. Poole shared with us: -For my history courses, I might project an original “primary source” — a document or artifact from history, such as a page from Shakespeare’s First Folio, a medieval manuscript, a map, a scene from the Sistine Chapel or the Declaration of Independence — and ask the students to analyze it and mark it up on the SmartBoard. -Thanks to the availability of very high quality scans on the Internet, I can offer students at my community college a reasonable facsimile (pun fully intended!) of that rare-books experience that used to be reserved only for the most elite college students. In an important way, it begins to close the gap between Ivy League and community college by letting students do real, primary-source reading and research, even if they’re miles from a top-level academic library. -Google Books is absolutely outstanding. Google Images Search is a surprisingly effective way to find well-known works of art. Google Earth allows me to show the terrain and move from place to place; the new 3D layer for ancient Rome is pretty cool, too. I —or my students — can use a map projected on a SmartBoard to trace lines on a map on Google Earth or on the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization and get a very clear sense of, for example, how the 14th century plague known as the Black Death traveled along major trade routes, or how early Christian missionaries followed the roads forged by the expansion of the Roman Empire. -I also often use the British Museum and British Library. The Turning the Pages exhibit is a favorite, and the stand-alone images are excellent as well. I’m also fond of the Shakespeare quartos comparison page. -Early Manuscripts at Oxford University is another terrific resource for scans. The manuscript section of the virtual Library of Congress is impressive. -When I don’t care about having digital scans of the originals, and I just want the text (and often, I want it translated!), I like to use Project Gutenberg, or the Modern History Sourcebook, or modern editions in Google Books. When the excerpt I need is available only in PDF or in a printed book, I simply type the excerpt I want onto a PowerPoint slide or create a Google page with it. Could I do this by reproducing the text or image onto paper handouts? Absolutely–and sometimes that’s what I do, particularly when I want students to work in pairs or alone. But often I want them to work as a large group, and I want to be able to model some of the techniques of source analysis or literary analysis for the group as a whole. An auxiliary benefit is that putting these sources on the Web or on PowerPoint (or both!) makes them more portable and durable, and also more “green.” -Projecting Web sites and programs allows me to model techniques for information literacy and communication. If a student asks a question, instead of answering it directly and moving on, sometimes I can show the entire class how to find the information using Google, or Google Scholar, or another public site or a database to which my college has subscribed. If we’re talking about how to get in touch with your Congressional representative, I can show you how to find his or her contact information on the web. -I can also model good academic habits: When I team-taught a class last semester, in which one of our responsibilities was to help students learn success skills like note-taking, sometimes I would project a computer screen where I would take notes in Microsoft Word as my colleague lectured. We can also project a student paper onto the screen and edit it as a group, or work together to brainstorm an outline or thesis statement or timeline. For brainstorming, a projected Word doc or Google doc serves essentially as a blackboard, with one crucial difference: I can save it, and, if I want, post it to a course website, print it as a handout, or “share” it among students after class. -As for teaching students to use PowerPoint, I’m not convinced that it’s a virtue in its own right, but I do feel a responsibility to teach my students to communicate effectively in the modes that seem to appeal to today’s audiences — and, particularly, to today’s hiring managers! Ms. Poole ends by saying: Dependence on PowerPoint to the exclusion of other tools and styles and genres is a problem, as is using PowerPoint badly. But that’s a problem for any genre of communication, written, oral or digital: you can create a dreadful eulogy, persuasive essay, lecture, eyewitness report, blog post or inaugural address. That doesn’t mean that these genres of communication are inherently bad; it means that you can do them badly or well. My challenge — and my pleasure — is teaching my students to do what they need to do, and to do it well. Teachers: Do you agree? When, why and how do you use PowerPoint? What other presentation tools do you use? Why?
Posted on: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 16:48:26 +0000
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