PowerPoint

PowerPoint presentations are a teacher’s best friend. They allow you to have clear, readable points and they help keep your lesson on track. Some of the things that I enjoyed from my classes PowerPoint presentations were the use of personal pictures. This was incredibly interesting to hear the history behind a location but to also hear what it was like first hand. Obviously, teachers cannot do this for every country or location that they teaching, but if they have visited a location they should definitely use a PowerPoint presentation to talk about their experience. Using PowerPoint to teach language is a very useful tool. It would be great to import real weather station clips and have students try to understand the report based upon the new vocabulary they have just learned.

While PowerPoint is a useful tool in teaching it might be used too much. Teachers should be careful of text heavy slides and reading from the slides. I didn’t notice this much in our classes presentations. My only suggestion for our classes PowerPoint’s would be the use of video. I think short clips are great additions to any presentation, however if they are longer than five minutes I would hesitate showing them. Or, for example, if a clip it too long, start the clip at the point that you feel it should begin to drive home the message.

The improvements that I would make to my own PowerPoint are that I would have picked a shorter topic. I thought that nutrient absorption would be a good topic because it has five major components, however I felt like I could not spend enough time on each nutrient to highlight the differences between them. But, overall I felt like I did while explaining how the body breaks down food.

Personally I love using PowerPoint in the classroom as both a teacher and a student. I remember in high school how hard it was to see and read what the teacher was writing on the board. I also remember that teachers would often tell one class one thing and not the other classes and wonder why students missed questions on test. PowerPoint removes all of these problems. It is clear and readable. It keeps the teacher on track and makes sure that every class receives the same information. Some teacher might say that creating a PowerPoint takes too long but if you consider that you would only have to write the information once rather than six times a day, it is a time saver. I think that all teachers should use PowerPoint if they are able to in their classroom.