Lesson 4 - PowerPoint in the Classroom

Technology offers many great resources for both teaching and learning. One of those resources includes presentation software (example: Microsoft Office PowerPoint). Microsoft Office PowerPoint has become a tool that many classrooms around the globe are now using. It’s much more engaging for students than the traditional transparencies on the overhead projector or even the use of the blackboard. PowerPoint presentations allows for the users to be creative, adding color, pictures, graphics, sounds, animations, and much more to attract its viewers. Teachers can use PowerPoint to enhance the curricula for teaching. Not only does Microsoft Office PowerPoint add creativity, it also allows the students to print the slides without having to take notes throughout the entire lesson and risk losing some of the vital information needed. The program is quite self explanatory and doesn’t take very long to learn how to use. Teachers can display their presentations on the SMART Board so that the entire class can view the presentation at the simultaneously. However, “Too much of a good thing can sometimes be bad”. Presentations can sometimes be overwhelming to students by having too many visuals and/or sounds. This is called the triple “P” – PowerPoint Paralysis. Triple “P” is simply when the author of a presentation includes too many visuals, etc. to the presentation that the viewers cannot absorb the information covered. Therefore, it’s extremely vital to know when to stop inserting things into one’s presentation.
I have used numerous PowerPoint presentations not only as a teacher, but also as a student. One particular PowerPoint presentation I have used in my classroom was “Name that Computer Part”. I showed this presentation to 1-6th graders to assess their knowledge of computer terminology and descriptions at the beginning of the school year. Each slide had a different computer part or other technology device, for example: monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, USB cord, flash drive, scanner, etc. We went over this presentation as a group and explained what each part was and its function. I plan to do this again at the end of the school year to assess what they have learned this school year in my computer lab.
There isn’t anything I would change to this presentation. It’s colorful, has sounds, and animations, and keeps the students engaged. I added as many visuals to the presentation as I could without them over-taking the purpose of the presentation. One of the components in my presentation in which I am the most proud is the fact that I added links to websites on the presentation that pertained to the term being covered. For instance, for the computer mouse I had a link to a website that provides a song about how a mouse works. It’s very basic and was great for the primary students, but some of the upper grade students thought it was too young for them. The following is the link to the computer mouse song if any of you are interested in using it: http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/songs/my-computer-mouse.