I normally use my slides as a guide while I lecture. Most of these are meaningless to my students. This week, for the first time ever, I created and presented my PowerPoint slides with specific ideas and suggestions pulled from journal articles in the required reading. I thought about what my students needed to see, what they did not, how much information was on each slide.
On Tuesday I created my best PowerPoint presentation to date. The students watched attentively and understood the content. Most amazing to me is that the whole presentation consisted of one word on three slides (the title), each slide with a different image. I fought hard the temptation to retype the words my students already had in front of them (in their books). I also did not want to retype my lesson plan. The images consisted of a progression of stacked cubes used to show volume in cubic units.
The hardest thing for the students to grasp when looking at cubic units is the fact that when cubes are stacked some are not visible. Last year I used building blocks to make a demonstration in front of the class. It worked ok. With the images of the blocks moving over three slides I was able to show the progression in forward and reverse order on a screen large enough for the whole class to see at once. It worked better.
I’m starting to think that images are the only things I will ever put on my slides (don’t hold me to that statement) since the words I can provide orally.
Stay tuned for more entries as I review my notes.
I’d like comments on using PowerPoint strictly for image slide shows.
2 comments:
The article for this week's reading (Computer Slide Shows: Trap for Bad Teaching) was great. Klemm makes some very helpful suggestions, which I will try to follow this semester. His primary premise is that we are visual learners and graphics alone should be the focus of PowerPoint presentations. This is easy to apply to my lecture on therapy for emotional disturbed children in the school system. The photos are poignant, emotionally laden reminders of the concepts I am presenting. However, I am having more difficulty envisioning how this might work for my statistics class. I remember seeing a presentation on the changes in the world economy with amazing graphics representing the statistics. I don't have the skill or time to produce such Hollywood-like effects, but even if I did, I am not sure I would. I personally was so dazzled by the presentation that I did not remember anything about the information! However, I believe that PPP has something to offer education in statistics. In any event, Klemm has inspired me to look through Merlot.org to see if I can find some good examples of PPPs that already been created.
Jessie,
I have viewed, created, and helped others create some very powerful PPT presentations... some of which contained only images, some mainly words, but most presentation files were comprised of a combination of words, images, links, buttons, and sound files. I have almost never used clip art, animated clip art, nor Power Point's built in sound effects. I encouraged my students to create their own graphics or use photographs when appropriate. Good photography and sound files can greatly enhance a presentation or an interactive tutorial or game.
In answer to your question, "Is it all in the image?", I would have to say, "No"... but use of images can be very important.
The audience, the context, the content, all need to be considered when making decisions about how to deliver instruction.
Suki
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