See imbedded responses below:
Philip Prescott-Decie said:
I am writing an essay on powerpoint presentations with the following
questions and sub questions.
Good for you! You will have fun doing so.
How effective are PowerPoint Presentations for students and teachers as an
educational tool.
They can be very effective as a method to teach students if you have the
skills to develop a good presentation and know how to actually present it.
As far as a good tool for the Student, unless they are using some computer
based training materials that allow for some interactivity for the student,
PowerPoint isn't going to do it. You MUST have some sort of instructor
and/or computer interaction to make the training effective.
IS IT ANY GOOD? IS IT REALLY AN EDU TOOL? DOES IT HELP TEACHERS TO TEACH AND
STUDENTS TO LEARN? IS STANDING UP AND JUST SAYING IT BETTER? IT'S ABILITIES
ARE GOOD (MEDIA ETC) BUT IT WAS ORIGINALLY MADE AS A PROFESSIONAL TOOL
It is great (of course, I am biased)! It can be a great EDU tool (see above
comment). I think Students can learn from it if Teachers know how to teach
using it. PowerPoint is more than typing words on colored slides and
reading them to your students. You can create high-quality animations that
trace flowpaths, explain concepts, etc., but the Teacher has to know how to
use PowerPoint to accomplish this. I doubt most Teachers have the time and
energy to learn PowerPoint to the level needed to be successful. Therefore,
the knock on PowerPoint. They need to understand how to manipulate slides
during the presentation to accomodate contingencies (Slide # + ENTER to move
back to other slides to reiterate points, etc.). They need to know how to
use it to test knowledges (review questions) with feedback to the students.
Yes it was originally made as a method to provide slides for meeting
(Charts, etc.), but even to this day probably 10 - 20% of PowerPoint's
capabilities are being used. There are several "built-in" interface
features that can be used to provide great training presentations, but until
you unlock the power of VBA (the programming language within Microsoft
Office), you are only touching the surface. Have you ever seen a Jeopardy
game created in PowerPoint that tests understanding of knowledges? have you
ever taken Computer based Training (CBT) developed in PowerPoint that can
ask your name upon starting, control how you go through the presentation,
provide you an exam at the end, port that data to Microsoft Access
(database) upon completion, or even print out a certificate of successful
completion if you scored above a certain grade? I doubt it! This is the
real "untapped" power. There are a lot of folks here who know a lot about
this power. Feel free to drop in anytime to gain some of this knowledge.
HOW MANY TEACHERS CAN MAKE An EFFECTIVE POWERPOINT PRESENTATION?
Having completed all of my education before PowerPoint was even considered
as a teach tool, I can't answer that one. However, being an instructor in
the nuclear power industry and being around a lot of other instructors, I
would guess that all of them know about 10 - 20% of the features, 50% of
them know almost half of the features, and hardly any of them know VBA
(except the ones I have taught). Of those, about half of the presentations
are effective. This is mostly due to the time to create them and if you
aren't efficient using the tool, preparation and/or development time could
suffer at the hands of having a real good presentation. I've always
considered my powerPoint development time as prep time for teaching.
Howeve, this is because I undestand the program enough to not have to spend
any time "figuring out how to do that". I can just focus on the materials.
DO STUDENTS ACTUALLY DO WORK OR JUST FIDDLE WITH THE ANIMATIONS?
Again, I don't know, but my guess is that if a professional assigned to
teach students doesn't know that much about the software, the students don't
know enough about it to do anything else than "fiddle". I'm not sure how
PowerPoint can be used in the hands of a student to learn anything if it
isn't going through the actual presentation designed to teach the materials.
That is, unless you are a student learning how to use PowerPoint.
HOW MUCH DO STUDENTS LEARN THROUGH PPP?
Only as much as is put in by the Teachers/Instructors.
HOW MUCH TO STUDENTS LEARN THROUGH MAKING PPP'S?
I wouldn't think it would be as much as it would be if the
Teacher/Instructor has developed a great presentation and uses it to teach
the information.
So I was wondering if anyone has any ideas, more questions i could ask
etc!
Ask them all. The more you ask, the more you learn. If you want to see a
few examples of interactivity of PowerPoint, check out my following links:
http://www.pttinc.com/cbt_development.html
or
http://www.pttinc.com/ppgame.htm
ENJOY! Hope I wasn't too long-winded.
