In which Power proves Pointless
Posted By Kevin Gaugler on December 1, 2008
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The educational use of PowerPoint, a program first released in 1987 for creating better overhead transparencies, has not changed that much in twenty years. We can now add better fonts, sound effects and new backgrounds but, with the exception of templates for turning your classroom into a game show, I struggle to find truly innovative educational applications of the tool. I have several problems with PowerPoint in the classroom. First, it promotes a one-sided conversation in which only the presenter talks to the audience. Second, when turned over to the students, it tends be used as a crutch for remembering one’s speech verbatim. I admit to using PowerPoint, but I try to only use it to display important images. In addition, I make sure that I provide my students with the slides so that they personalize their learning by talking notes on the slides or splicing their own slides intermittently. And if I have students present with PowerPoint, I always give a talk on presentation skills and how to enhance a talk with visuals beforehand.
More recently, however, I find that moving the classroom presentation tool to an online format provides for new dynamics in information sharing. Google’s presentation tool, for example, permits one to easily collaborate with others for group presentations. In addition, when presenting, a chat window appears on the left side of the screen, allowing one to create an instant backchannel for the classroom. The presenter might even involve the audience with an activity like Google jockeying in which students “Google” in real-time and share results with their peers on the screen. Take a look at this three-minute video for an overview of the sharing features of Google Docs.
Google is not the only service helping to evolve the PowerPoint presentation. A site called Myplick lets you upload your presentation, add audio and share it with an online community. Slideshare, another popular site, also allows you to easily upload and share your PowerPoint presentation, either by permitting direct downloads and/or posting to other social sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Blogger. You can search presentations via one word descriptors called tags or through community-based rankings such as ‘most downloaded’ ‘most embedded’ ‘most viewed’ and ‘most favored’.
Recently, I even discovered a web-based presentation tool called 280Slides that does not even require a login to start working with the software. The service allows you to integrate web-based multimedia easily, then download and share your creations. The next time you are about to launch PowerPoint, even if you are a technophobe, I recommend you try launching 280slides instead. I’ve embedded a short presentation to introduce you to the tool. It’s new, so it might not have everything you are looking for in a presentation tool, but the fundamentals are there and I believe 280slides is a service to watch. I particularly like the ability to embed videos into the slide by doing a simple search. I invite you to take a look at my short presentation below and then tell me how you are taking your slide presentations to the next level. I’m dying to know.
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