Death by Powerpoint
“Boring meetings”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3993483.stm and the main culprit seems to be PowerPoint. Edward Tufte has concerns over the “Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”:http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint as reported at some length by Wired Magazine (September 2002) under the headline “PowerPoint is Evil”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html.
How to not bore students with PowerPoint
* Maximum *5 to 7 slides*
* Use PowerPoint for what it is good at – drawing tools and *custom animations* to show workflows, processes
* Use PowerPoint in *editing mode* to record student ideas – save – distriubute afterwards
* Use PowerPoint to introduce activities and keep the pace – like an *animated lesson plan*. Group activities summarised as slides so everyone knows what to do
* Use diagrams without labels and give students printouts to write on – if it is a complex diagram print the slide full size so there is plenty of room to write notes. Use questionning to get the labels written…