PowerPoint - you can't teach an old dog new tricks

Oh yes you can! I have probably delivered about 20 or so presentations using PowerPoint, and have probably designed and prepared about 300 presentations in my working career.

Today I had a lot of fun playing around in PowerPoint, (again - I also spent a lot of time doing the PowerPoint activities in Moodle last week).  I created a little slide show on Natural Disasters. I did the initial plan for the presentation in word in outline view and opened it in PowerPoint. I never knew you could do that. 

As a teacher, I would spend more time planning the presentation and linking it to activities and assessments. However, for the purposes of learning about the tool in more detail, I prepared a quick presentation where I could test a few features of the tool. I have included hyperlinks, sounds, images and youtube videos. I have added action buttons to make for smoother transitions. As discussed I have had a bit of experience using PowerPoint and even with my experience I would say it is not as user friendly as say Glogster or Prezi. I see it's use as a teaching presentation tool, but it isn't as effective in engaging me like Glogster is. Perhaps it would not be as good for students as a presentation tool as the Glogster or Prezi would be.

Take a look

Natural disasters

View more presentations from Clothesline

I have used the PMI thinking routine to explore PowerPoint as a presentation tool below:-

Plus:

• Excellent for multiple choice quizzes in the classroom
• Good way to get short simple messages across
• Efficient way to plan a largely visual/verbal lesson using images
• Great to explore detail about a certain topic
• The multiple mouse idea is a great one.

Minus:-

• Can be boring if its just text
• Not incredibly user friendly, I needed to go back to the Moodle site and google a few things to work out how to do some activities eg uploading it to your blog, embedding images etc.
• If not used correctly it is just a 'chalk and talk' - boring!

Interestings

• Might be an opportunity to introduce children to the rules of the classroom
• Seems effective for displaying graphs and statistics.

I was planning on doing PowerPoint as one of my technologies, but I am not convinced now.  I am starting to favour Glogster...Hmmmm...I may have to compare the pair!