Take Back the Classroom from PowerPoint

9.4.10 – Jason Fertig – Restrict PowerPoint use in teaching to pictures and videos, writes Jason Fertig. Too much PowerPoint usurps professors' authority and accustoms students to lazy thinking.

Poor PowerPoint use makes good speakers bad, and bad speakers worse. Last week, I expressed my concern with the use of a comic book as a management text. This week, I further my thesis on pedagogical advances that have detrimental effects in the classroom.

The beginning of the fall semester can be a fun and exciting time – new students, new classes, new classrooms, and new colleagues. Yet, with all that may be new, there is one thing that is not changing – most of these new classes will involve a song and dance through a sequence of PowerPoint slides.

PowerPoint can enhance a presentation if integrated properly. Compared to the old slide carousels, PowerPoint is much more efficient for adding images to enhance a presentation. Speakers no longer have to struggle with sequencing tiny, fragile slides in order and lugging around cumbersome projectors. A simple upload from portable storage now produces an endless stream of images. However, as most of us can attest, the majority of PowerPoint presentations across classrooms project much more than pictures. That practice does more harm than good in most cases.

I remember the first time I used PowerPoint in class. The minute my first slide went up, the students’ heads went down and the pens started moving. Pavlov would have been proud, but I was not. Regardless of how many different animations and builds that I tried, the result was the same. As I proceeded to talk, students were more focused on copying down the slides than listening to me speak. If students were so focused on writing down slide contents, why did I have to open my mouth? It would be much easier to walk into the room, play some elevator music in the background, and click through a series of slides.

How to keep students from getting fixated on slide content? Some have suggested that a professor should provide slides beforehand, or that lectures should cover additional information not included on slides. But those are just band-aids to a larger presentation problem: presenters use PowerPoint slides as speaking notes.

Unfortunately, the institutionalized norm across colleges is the projection of the professor’s speaking notes, rather than well-planned visual aids. This manifests itself in several different presentation faux pas:

Facing the slides for the majority of the time, while occasionally stopping to look at the audience
The slides driving, rather than the professor. When a lesson takes longer than expected, the professor will feel rushed to get through the next 45 slides in the remaining 5 minutes, thus ensuring that the class will retain neither the rushed content nor the slides that flash through so quickly that there is no chance to make notes.
(My personal favorite) The projection of a chart that contains either numbers or text in such small font that the speaker resorts to stating, “I know you can’t see this, but….”

continue… http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1524

Education News

Take Back the Classroom from PowerPoint

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Hot Topics