How a Classroom Technology Application Enhances Lessons
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Like any classroom technology, PowerPoint needs to be used well. It is similar to using video: if you just pop in the DVD and sit back, no effective learning takes place. If you just use bullets and slide after slide, you loose teachable moments by not engaging your students with the technology application. In fact, Edward Tufte wrote in The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within,
Especially disturbing is the introduction of PowerPoint into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to decorate client pitches and infomercials…
It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? This is the way, Tufte says, to train “mini-bureaucrats.” And I would agree, except that I have seen PowerPoint used well. One example is from a fifth grade language arts class. The students were not getting the format of response to literature essay, no matter how much the teacher explained and showed them examples. Finally, she put aside the paper, and told the students to do a PowerPoint presentation. She gave them guidelines: they had to have a topic sentence, they had to have at least three pieces of evidence, they had to have quotes from the story they’d read.
All of these were the elements she’d been talking about until she was blue in the face and still not able to convey the meaning to her students. She was delighted when every student was able to put together a coherent PowerPoint presentation that hit exactly the marks she’d been hoping for with their essays. What they could not structure on paper they were able to with the PowerPoint application. Now, Mr. Tufte says:
Student PowerPoint exercises typically shows 5 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides – a total of perhaps 80 words (20 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work.
The teacher – actually the students – used PowerPoint as a springboard to the essay writing assignment—not as their writing and reading lessons for the week. Once the students had the concept down, she was able to help them flesh the presentations out into essays. As always, classroom technology only works when everyone is engaged – teacher and students, and it only works well when it is regarded as a tool, not an all-encompassing teacher-replacement. To maximize your use of PowerPoint and other media, check out this article. We don’t want to train any mini-bureaucrats!
