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 agree that some profs use PowerPoint in a lazy way that’s damaging to learning. HOWEVER, I still think that slides (either PowerPoint or, better yet, TexPoint in the case of math classes) can be a great tool for learning…especially if you’ve got a prof with bad handwriting on the board. I’ve had a few professors who have used these tools really well:
1. In a law class, using PowerPoint to put up photos of the justices or other people involved in the cases, and to put up blocks of text from cases so people could follow along as the prof was discussing the interpretation of that text without flipping through a bulky reader every few minutes.
2. In a math class, the prof provided slides ahead of time so that students could read them over and get an idea of what material was coming ahead of class. Then, in class, you didn’t have to be frantically scribbling down formulas but could rather read along on printed slides and actually LISTEN to the complicated concepts he was presenting while taking shorter notes of anything not on the slides. In a class with extremely dense mathematical material, this was a lifesaver and allowed me to focus on understanding what was being said rather than just getting it all written down. Also, it was way less stressful!
This is just two examples, but the bottom line is that these tools can be great and truly enhance the classroom experience IN THE RIGHT HANDS. Of course, a lazy/bad lecturer can use power point in lazy/bad ways, but are we really to think that such professors would be so amazing lecturing without slides?
A good PowerPoint presentation features slides with absolutely none of the speaker’s spoken text. Sadly, most PPT is nothing more than the speaker’s notes, with a couple charts, graphs, or some clipart thrown in
You want to have an effective slide show? Be creative. Talking sex? Show pictures of bananas and donuts.
I am a visual learner and have a hard time remembering things I hear. I am also a terrible note taker. So I love powerpoint presentations. But they have to be done right.
PPT presentations are good when:
1. They’re organized and outline the direction of the lecture or presentation.
2. They’re concise and summarize the takeaway points — the details should be left to the speaking portion.
3. They provide certain data or facts that are hard to jot down, like definitions or formulas
I read both links and was impressed, especially by T.X. Hammes’s arguments. And I was all ready to sign on to some cabbage throwing that would ease some of my psychic pain. But wait just a minute–aren’t we blaming the tools instead of the crafters?
Powerpoint at least saved the endless struggles with overhead projectors, the burned out lamps and the search for an ashtray to prop up the projectors front foot.
So I don’t think powerpoint is the problem at all…..I think MEETINGS are the problem.
If you’ve ever watched a group of good engineers working to solve a hard problem or reach a technical decision, you’ll know that PowerPoint is never involved in the process.
So why do managers use it? The obvious answer is that they are not trying to solve problems or reach decisions. Clearly, managers use PowerPoint to be ineffective on purpose; that is, to NOT solve problems, and NOT make decisions. Or more specifically, to leave the problem solving and decision making to someone else.
What’s surprising is that what managers do is seen as a template for how students should be taught, when clearly the model we should be following in our classrooms is the one adopted by engineers. We have enough indecisive, incompetent management in this country. Techie types are our future.
So let’s see, folks who dislike PPT so much: you’d like it better if the same person wrote out the contents of the slides on a blackboard, possibly illegibly. Right? The problem is with the pedagogy, not the technology, and properly used, prepared graphics almost always make a presentation better. Even from a rotten instructor, at least the PPT version is quick and legible. It also paces the presentation and makes it less likely that the presenter will go off on tangents or become hopelessly lost. Compared to reading the notorious yellowed notes, PPT is definitely an upgrade.
I’m an award-winning instructor, and I like Powerpoint, but I like it best when I can use a Tablet PC, so the slides can be very spare and/or visually compelling, and I can write on them.
Check out John Medina’s book Brain Rules (he is a developmental molecular biologist) for some fascinating info on why the typical Powerpoint slide is so hard to remember.
Or check out Garr Reynolds’ slide show synopsis of the info from the book (in a very a-typical powerpoint style: http://www.slideshare.net/garr/brain-rules-for-presenters)
Shouldn’t “truly engaging” be applied equally to the teacher AND student?
I find that most students do not read the textbook because that too is boring*.There is a reason classes are called lectures.It is a discussion (one way or two) that provides context to supplement the text book, or course notes. But it is the students responsibility to ask questions and be engaged.
*They dont read the textbook for comprehension. They do read the material once and simply via osmosis think the material has been learned.