Ubiquitous in classrooms, PowerPoint makes lecturing easy, boring, and forgettable, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. That’s exactly why lazy students like it: if their teacher isn’t truly engaging with the material, they don’t have to either. The PowerPoint crutch isn’t just an academic problem: it’s wrecking the Pentagon’s decision-making, too. How long before people start blaming PowerPoint for the financial crisis? (Edward Tufte was perhaps the first hater.) [%comments]
A Different Kind of Teacher Cheating
TAGS: PowerPoint
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I hate Power Point. The only good use I’ve seen of the program is for art history lectures, where just an image and basic identifying information appear on the screen. Digital images aren’t perfect for art, but they are often better than old-fashioned slides, which turn pinkish with age.
Thomas P.M. Barnett is the defense world’s leading practitioner of PowerPoint voodoo:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4689061169761152025&ei=n-txSv3PLYzWqAOKsdyFAg&q=thomas+barnett
The shame is that he has very interesting things to say but his style of presentation makes him sound like a self-help guru. C-SPAN ran a talk he gave at a bookstore where he was denied PowerPoint, and it consisted of him reading from his book. But the Q&A that followed was very good.
I have been on the PP hating train for quite some time. I’ve been out of college for a couple years, but I began seeing PP as a cop-out for true lecturing and presentation skills back in high school (when everyone was jumping on and just loving it). Unfortunately, my employer still thinks that its the bees’ knees and I have to sit through PP’s still. What’s worse than the ubiquity of its use though, is the number of people that are continually impressed by it…….
No slideshow and moving wordart images can replace public speaking skills.
Not a new phenomenon… I had a professor in high school who had overhead projector slides that he developed (probably his first year teaching) and used year after year after year. He’d put up the slide, read it, pause for a second, then put up the next… like a teaching robot.
Let’s not blame the medium, but the manner of its use. TV is a wasteland today (I barely turn it on) because of the content that it beams. Radio (in the US) is a wasteland save for NPR. Films are mostly garbage except for the indies that are truly worth watching.
I did use Powerpoint as a crutch in my early years of teaching (transitioning from transparencies). The PPTs I use today bear no resemblance to your typical bulleted slides. PPT should never be used as the main course, but to AUGMENT the learning experience. It should be used primarily for graphics and images. Text should be employed in a minimalist way.
And no, PPTs should never be used in the usual serial way, from Slide 1 to Slide N, pouring information into students’ heads.
And there are classes I facilitate (the term ‘teaching’ is a huge misnomer that needs to be banned) that involve no PPTs at all.
Two things:
1. Die, Bullets, Die!
2. Ignore all of Microsoft’s standard templates
The powerpoint problem has been realized in the DOD for years, and is the butt of jokes at all ranks. It is actively despised by the poor souls who try to condense complex 30 page reports into 3-4 bullets, and those forced to sit through them. So why do they still do it?
*Because that’s the way we always done it around here*
Change is the enemy in large organizations, and few are larger than the government.
I speak professionally on a regular occasion and I loathe PowerPoint; however, it’s just taken as common place at meetings. Instead of paying attention to your presentation the attendees are busy on the Blackberries while then relying on you to give them copies of the presentation. If I have to use it, I put as little information in it as possible to make them pay attention, or at least contact me to see what they missed.
I recently started teaching introductory-level Spanish at a university, and I admit my first semester teaching I used a lot of Powerpoint. It was the easy way to do things, but didn’t help when students needed a different explanation or a more personalized approach to the topic- plus it made things a little monotonous.
The last few classes I taught, I have mainly used it for making presentations of vocabulary with pictures, which is the ideal use for Powerpoint in the foreign language classroom, but when it comes to grammar, nothing beats the old whiteboard.