After reading Scott’s posting on Creating Presentations That Don’t Suck! and the links to authors like Kathy Sierra and Seth Godin (good reading there!), I started thinking about how I could use Power Point to engage and keep my students’ attention. I really appreciated Guy Kawasaki’s 10 – 20 -30 Rule Presentation for putting some perspective on using slide presentations. What no one here has delved into is the actual “how” of making a useful, meaningful, engaging presentation for use in the classroom, let alone what educational applications these products are good for. [I will have to research this] I see many uses for placing whole passages on a single slide, especially when disecting text or teaching reading strategies. I see (and have been learning) how transitions and animation can be used to help engage the students’ interest and accentuate important concepts. I agree with Seth though – that too much of a good thing can bury the meaning and destroy the intent, which is to sell the idea.

Now that raises a whole new crop of brain fodder. The whole marketing/teaching paradigm from Kathy’s post “Marketing should be education, education should be marketing.” I can see from a marketer’s point the value of “selling” an idea, concept, or product, but my kids need to come away with something meaningful they can value and use in their life, beyond school. They don’t need “buyer’s remorse” at such a young age just because I am good at selling them some educational propaganda that doesn’t work out for them. If it has no substance or value - if it is not authentic, I not only lose my credibility as an expert in my field – I lose them. I already see the slouched posture and hear the mumbled “this is bogus” in my mind, because I was that kid. And I was one of the bright ones. I knew what was useful to me, when it meant something to me, and when I was being fed a load of bulls**t. I could feel when I was being “sold,” and I resented it. I preferred to have the facts first, and if there was to be any emotional response to the knowledge it would come after I had made sense of it. I didn’t need the “warm fuzzy” before I would accept someone’s premise or argument, in fact it took quite a bit of heated debate and calming down before I could.

…but now I am for bed, and sleep, and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…………  

14 April 07 –

Back into the fray! We are exploring a few methods for presentation that revolve around PowerPoint that incorporate aspects such as brevity of information, font size, and connected content that the presenter “sells” to their audience. Here is a site from the UK that has some examples of how PowerPoint can be used for education.