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Beyond PowerPoint: Building a New Classroom Presenter
Presentation technology has long had an influence on how we teach. In the wonderful quote above, the abolitionist Samuel J. May described his introduction to the blackboard and its impact on teaching. The quote illustrates a couple of key points: That technology has an important role in supporting classroom instruction, and that technologies perceived as beneficial to instruction will become widely adopted. The blackboard is a very powerful tool for instruction—it allows information to be displayed in a persistent manner, and can give the audience a consistent view of far more information than can be held in short-term memory. The blackboard becomes a mediating artifact that maintains a shared view between the instructor and students to provide context for lecture and discussion.
Stepping forward almost two centuries from Samuel May’s visit to Boston, projected electronic slides are becoming an important presentation tool in the classroom. There are some significant advantages to using electronic slides. Slides allow advanced preparation of material, improving organization of the presentation and giving a means of showing information-rich content such as complex tables, formulas, programs, and diagrams. Slides afford instantaneous display, avoiding the inaccuracy and the time of copying material onto an overhead projector or whiteboard. Electronic slides offer the further advantage of not having to print slides. Additional advantages of online materials include ease of preparation, sharing, and modification.
However, these advantages come at a cost in the classroom. Both students and instructors complain about the impact of using slides in lecture. One colleague expressed this directly as, “PowerPoint sucks the life out of a class.” The basic issue is that electronic slides tend to script a lecture and do not provide mechanisms to adapt the presentation to the audience. An important part of lecturing is adjusting material in response to audience reactions and developing spontaneous examples and explanations to clarify and expand on topics. The weakness of electronic projection of slides is the absence of a means to alter or augment the displayed material to do this.
06-06-2004, 10:09 AM
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