Using digital presentation software (such as PowerPoint or Google Presentation) improves productivity and instruction. It is a valuable way of increasing student engagement and memory in the classroom. It is a means of sharing information that appeals to learners who prefer a mixture of visual and auditory input. It’s attractive to students because it appeals to their diverse learning styles through multimedia sounds, images, color, action, and design. The messages from well-designed presentations are clear and concise, helping learners to attend to the information in a focused way. Just like children’s book illustrations help enrich a story and bring it to life, presentation software can help tell a “story” and break down the learning experience into digestible chunks. This brevity of the slides’ content aids in comprehension and fosters an improved commitment to long-term memory. If used sparingly and appropriately, sounds and motions can also help sustain attention.
Presentation software is easy to use and easy to modify. This means that students and teachers can create interactive and attractive designs by using professional-quality standard templates/themes or by using their own. This ensures that teachers and students who are less artistically inclined can still feel confident creating a visually-dense presentation. The graphic design piece is already in place. Time and frustration in creating other paper-based visual aids, such as charts or posters, can be avoided. Color-coordinated styles, fonts, and spell-check take away the tedium of some of the low-ordering thinking tasks typically associated with presentations. This allows more time for acquiring and organizing knowledge. In addition, reordering slides in a presentation, adding images, or altering text content can be done instantaneously and without much labor.
The art of presentation is much smoother with this software as well. If teachers or students are presenting their slideshow, it is easy to advance to the next slide and maintain the audience’s attention. There is less of an opportunity for distractions than there might be with bending over to use overhead transparencies or facing a whiteboard. A good presentation could also eliminate the need for distracting handouts. It’s important to note, however, that the presentation itself must not become a distraction. Good design principles, variety of content, pace, and limited animations/sounds are important to ensure maximum benefit. (For ideas on this see: www.garrreynolds.com, office.microsoft.com, howstuffworks.com, or www.makeuseof.com)
PowerPoint-type software can aid in collaboration by involving every student in the learning and teaching processes. Peer-teaching opportunities abound. Investigative reporting is a great launching point for this software because the students take charge of their own learning, and there is an authentic “performance” piece at the end in the form of an interactive presentation (which can serve as a formative assessment). Roblyer and Doering also suggest student-produced activities such as book reports, poetry writing, research or persuasive presentations, sharing “how-to” procedures, or simple concept reviews (p. 132-133).
In addition to being collaborative, presentation software can be quite interactive. Students can include hyperlinks or embedded videos in their presentations to give examples or provide evidence. They can link to or embed their peers’ slides in a group presentation as well. Modern software is quite dynamic and allows multiple avenues for interconnectivity and hypermedia.
Presentation software is not always intended to stand alone (without narration), but is convenient to have on hand for review. Students who are absent from class can still benefit from watching a PowerPoint presentation at home to get a handle on new information. The fact that digital presentations are easily embedded into websites means that students can review lectures, demonstrations, project descriptions, tutorials, or portfolios at home by accessing their class website.
Teachers can also save time and energy by preserving their presentations (and building on them to improve a lesson), instead of writing on the whiteboard or giving the same lecture/instructions over and over again. Presentation software makes sharing information a very organized experience. It provides structure to a lesson. It also helps annotate or highlight important concepts and terms in a visually-appealing way. For example, providing print-outs of PowerPoint slides alongside a presentation could support and promote note-taking skills (if that was the objective skill being rehearsed). Despite being quite structured, presentations are easily modifiable, and therefore flexible to include additions and improvements at any time.
Students also benefit from this software built-in scaffolding that encourages them to think sequentially and segmentally. It helps them improve their organization skills by requiring them to think through what they are going to say, do, and show in a systematic way. It is a constructive means to an end.
Please review my presentation software integration example by clicking here
(Note: In its current "presentation-mode" form, due to a Google bug perhaps, the hyperlinks are not clickable. Therefore, please refer to the final slide for URLs of linked websites.)
References
Roblyer, M., & Doering, A. H. (2013). Intergrating Educational Technology into Teaching (Sixth Edition ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education.
UCF Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning. (2014). Effective Use of PowerPoint. Retrieved from: http://www.fctl.ucf.edu/teachingandlearningresources/Technology/PowerPoint/index.php
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