PowerPoint Presentations

When I began playing with PowerPoint, I recognised how little I knew about it. Reminiscing back to my primary school years, I began to reflect on the knowledge that I had learned and the presentations that I used to create. As I only had a basic understanding of how to operate PowerPoint, I fiddled around with other features. I then taught myself how to use the upgraded version of PowerPoint (because we all know how often there are upgrades released). I researched this application in Google to give me a head start on the new and improved POWERPOINT!

My prior memory of it really just linked to boring, informative lecture presentations with a coloured background filled with text. I really wanted to explore possible engaging features that PowerPoint could offer. My new and improved presentation involves hyperlinks, timed entrance and exits of text, sound, moving objects, pictures and finally colourful and engaging slides. It was when I was looking at my exciting new work that I began to realise how distracting my presentation actually was. This came as a challenge to me and the presentation that I had created for students in my class really not only was engaging, but may have been too busy and distract meaning away and cloud the outcome that I was trying to achieve.

How would I use PowerPoint in the classroom?

‘Other than learning the intricacies of PowerPoint as a program, PowerPoint can form the basis or media to create quick interactive classroom aids in the form of presentations, slide-shows, quizzes, etc. These classrooms can be both virtual and traditional - PowerPoint content can be easily exchanged, edited and evolved to enliven a collaborative environment (Bajaj, 2009).’
My PowerPoint presentation involved slide shows of the students vocabulary words that they needed to learn. I ran the slide along with some pictures and definitions of the words so that the students could see the words and their corresponding meaning also with a visual representation of the words. I then created memory cards with a printout of the slides and used them for the students to match up the definitions with the words and their visual representation. This would allow the students to become engaged whilst still achieving the outcomes that I was aiming to achieve. An extension activity could have involved the students creating their own PowerPoint presentation with the words they still had difficulty with so that they could remember the meaning and spelling. I received this idea whilst looking up Ideas for using PowerPoint in a classroom (Christie, 2009).
Although PowerPoint presentations can be informative and engaging, I think that there is a fine line between the presentations being engaging and distracting. In my original presentation, I found that my eyes were wondering away from the text and focusing on busy pictures. In a classroom situation, the PowerPoint presentation could engage students and showcase ideas in presentation form, but if too busy, could lead them away from achieving the desired outcome.




References:

Bajaj, G. (2009) Learning PowerPoint. Viewed on 05/08/09 from:
http://www.indezine.com/products/powerpoint/ppedu.html

Christie, A. (2009) Ideas for using PowerPoint in a classroom. Viewed on 06/08/09 from:
http://internet4classrooms.com/ideas_pp.htm