Using PowerPoint in teaching is really helpful if used properly. It would make the teacher’s lessons/presentations clearer, more interesting and motivating and it helps the students grasp their lessons easily through the possibility to use a variety of tools and techniques that would tap on different learning styles. I have discovered through the provided reading materials that the way I use PowerPoint is not adequate. It is not a simple matter of choosing slides and loading them with scripts, images, audios and videos. If it is to be used in a class, it should be used interactively. But what is an interactive PowerPoint?
All in all, an interactive PowerPoint should display appropriate form and content and involve the audience in real interaction. A PowerPoint, as Deborah Healey says in her PowerPoint presentation “Interactive PowerPoint: Not your usual approach - A sampling of ideas from Deborah Healey” is not only by using buttons and hyperlinks, but by involving the students throughout the lesson as well. An effective one should activate their background knowledge schema through using interesting questions and “hooking” their attention. The learners could be integrated by sharing the lesson’s objectives with them.
The form of the slides is also important as it would help in the success or failure of a lesson. It should be appealing, motivating and interesting. A slide is never interesting by the amount of things you load in it what ever the importance of the information is, but god slides display short text in clear colors and font. The simpler the slide is the better. There are no particular forms we should stick to. There is a variety of techniques we can use, but it doesn’t mean that we have to make our slides heavy with colors and unclear writing. We have to choose appropriate word size, front and background colors, images, animation, clear graphs…
Presenting should make use of a number of facilitating techniques such as blank slide to make a smooth transition or change the focus of the audience. Other techniques are ConcepTest, Think-Pair-Share, Interpreted Lecture, Rapid Reflection, QuickWrite… We should therefore use the most helping ones.
Both the form and the content of PowerPoint slides should be convenient. There are plenty of tools and techniques, but these should be use reasonably to make our lessons more interesting and motivating.
Hamid
Dear Hamid,
ReplyDeleteOh, you are SO right! Interactive PowerPoint is not interactive if it's only the teacher who interacts with it! I agree with you that even if we choose carefully our text, color, images, buttons, etc., PowerPoint will not be successful if it doesn't attract the learner to be involved in his own learning. But of course we still want to please the viewer, work to choose appropriate balance between color, text and image, even blank slides! Like you, I learned a lot from Deborah's PPP and related links this week. More power to us! -- to empower our students!
Yours,
Ellen :)
Ellen
Dear Ellen,
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading my posts and leaving a comment.
An interactive PPT would be successful if it makes good use of both the form and the content. The content should be intersting and the form should be appealing to optimize our learning.
Yours,
Hamid
Dear Hamid,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the great efforts you're making herin to share your ideas and thoughts about how crucial using new tools and technics in language teaching is. The two last decades, actually, have been a time for ICT first. Unfortunately, the majority of Moroccan teachers of English, including me, rarely use ICT in their classes. Keep up the good work,anyway, and I wish you the best of luck.
Yours,
Adel