Playing with Power Point

In my next post, you will see my power point presentation.  I chose to do a presentation on smoking that targeted Year 7 students.  There are so many social, economic, health and environmental issues with smoking and we can all relate to it on some level.  Our students are not exempt.  I chose a health approach.  I also thought that year 7 would be ideal because they are on the cusp of highschool during which time most kids start to smoke.  The activities that I suggested could easily follow the Engagement Theory of learning.  In small groups, they are required to create an anti-smoking campaign using any media of their choice targeting a particular group of their choosing (e.g. parents with kids, youth, general smokers, friends, pregnant women etc), as well as compile a resource kit with information, advice, community supports, support groups to help them quit.

Regarding using PowerPoint, I spent an enormous amount of time playing with it to create something Ok-ish.  I know there is a lot more potential with it, but this will take time and practice.  I found it all very time consuming because I spent a bit of time researching the topic (I didn't just want to make it up), then, trying to get it to look OK and sequence OK.  My goodness!!!  And I would have liked to have had a video play straight into PP, but I couldn't work that out.  I have some audio on there too that plays automatically when viewed in PP, but I lost the audio in the transition phase into my blog.  I don't know how to fix that either.  So, I found that very frustrating.  Then I couldn't embed the darned thing into my blog, aarrrgghhhh!!!!!!!!  It was so frustrating but thank goodness for people out there who know what they are doing and can lend a hand.  But what a marathon effort to say the least.  Sadly, it is still very basic and is highly visual, so I probably didn't cater well for all students' learning styles.  Of course, I would never just set up a presentation like this and leave them to it (not with a topic like this anyway; online homework, however would be a different thing).  A lot of discussion could be generated as we go through the slides.

While I was fiddling, I noticed you can do a lot with PP (e.g. put in graphs, organisers, sound effects, probably music if you wanted to, have the slide open in many different ways, lots of colours etc).   Armed with all that information, you could create a masterpiece.  I think, having done mine, that I would have been better off just taking a part of the topic and putting it in a powerpoint instead of trying to cover lots of things in the one presentation.  For example, in mine, I could have just focussed on the anti-smoking campaigns, or the health implications, or the socio-cultural issues surrounding smoking.  So, in terms of using PP as a teaching tool, as one idea, it could be used to introduce a topic and generate discussion.

Other things PP could be used for include: advanced organisers, online homework, framework for lessons, supporting lessons by highlighting key points, presenting tips and outlines, presenting examples, providing pictures and other graphics supporting the material, stimulating interest by use of clipart, cartoons, audio and video; and displaying assignment information.

Students could use PP to present projects, provide visual/auditory information to support debates, create stories, for oral presentations, create games that could be used to support concepts learnt in class.  It could be used to display some of their work e.g. in art.  As it has so many features, I think PP is limited only by our imagination and it can be used for big and small projects alike.  I look forward to using powerpoint in the classroom.  I just hope it doesn't take as long as this one did, but I suppose that once they are set up, you can re-use them and modify them accordingly.  So, time spent in the beginning could be time saved down the track.