Good PowerPoints vs. BAD PowerPoints

I am presenting at a city wide workshop for secondary teachers, and one of my objectives is to encourage participants to either quit using PowerPoints in the classroom as the sole method of technology integration/delivery, or sprucing/livening them up and improving them. I know I've seen effective PPT examples out there in cyberspace, but I forget where I found them. Do you have good examples of how PPTs should look and really effective ones that I can use for examples? Thanks ahead of time!

Tags: PowerPoint

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Permalink Reply by Maria Fleyshgakker on February 6, 2009 at 7:25pm

You are absolutely correct, this is another aspect I really wanted to discuss. Very often students are required to copy some notes from the textbooks or whatever the teacher wrote on the board; it happens so often that if you don't tell them to copy they copy anyway, they were trained to copy something all the time from the first grade, then in the middle school. Here in HS they complain when I don't allow them to copy the text of the problem they have to solve. It seems sometimes that they believe copying is a synonym to learning.

With the PPP it's completely different, they are doing research, they are expected to read a lot of text and chose very little to copy. I usually tell them that PPP is not a writing assignment, it is a reading assignment. It is important to differentiate exactly because of what you are saying. They have to know where they copied the info from and learn to create a bibliography (it's not in my assignments, but for my best students, I have this one more slide). When they go to college they can get much higher grades if they know how to show their resources.I remember I was getting Bs until I learned to copy and recite :) absolutely all professors at NYU required reciting, not my own thoughts :) They probably were old school :)

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Permalink Reply by Maria Fleyshgakker on February 7, 2009 at 12:29pm

Sorry, I forgot to mention, that because of the specifics of the software the students can make lists, use organizers, while they are reading. So it's c/p, but copy only a word or a sentence.
Plus, PPP allows you to make graphs and convert them into different style.

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Permalink Reply by Raphael Rousseau on February 6, 2009 at 12:53pm

Hi Brian,

The example I'm going to give you is not intended for teaching purpose, but it's one of a person that is know as making brilliant presentations, Dick Hardt :
http://identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/

I've been said he uses Apple's Keynote: http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/

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Permalink Reply by Brian on February 6, 2009 at 12:54pm

Thanks, Raphael!

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Permalink Reply by Eve Heaton on February 6, 2009 at 2:46pm

Brian -

I just embedded my first student PowerPoint project on our blog using authorstream. The transitions didn't take but I am ok with that as long as the audio held. This is the first time I have run a project like this with fourth graders so we both learned a lot. I love all the suggestions here. Hopefully our presentations will start getting better. The project online is a reflection of some highly motivated students. They are done a week early and are now training my other student on how to use the audio narration feature of powerpoint. I have another group who will be finished next week who have already asked to make another.

www.mrsheatonsclass1.blogspot.com