Here's a provocative article from Jeffrey Young at the Chronicle of Higher Education about the use of Powerpoint in the classroom. Young describes the experience of the dean of the Meadows School of Arts who is trying to optimize the use of technology to create content in order to free up traditional lecture time for more engaging activities. It's a refreshing look at how to use technology to good effect while returning the focus of the classroom to active teaching and learning.
Young refers to an article from the British Educational Research Journal; (Mann, S. and Robinson A. "Boredom in the lecture theatre: an investigation into the contributors, moderators and outcomes of boredom amongst university students." Apr2009, Vol. 35 Issue 2, p243-258, 16p) in which students claimed that Powerpoint was a major contributor to their own boredom in the classroom. But in this case, Powerpoint appears to be not so much the villain as the straw man, the real culprit being passive, information-giving classes with little variety or activity. The abstract is available through the BCIT library databases but the full text of the article hasn't been released yet.
July 21, 2009
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3 comments:
simple but effective rules for power point presentations - The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint - http://bit.ly/IvYjM
simply put no more than 10 slides, 20 minutes and 30 point font. if you can't keep it withing those constraints you have not refined your message and are sure to bore the audience.
Or better still, follow the tips from Garr Reynolds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ2vtQCESpk). *Then* revisit your PowerPoint slides...
Or try this for a completely different approach that drops PowerPoint altogether: http://prezi.com/
Thanks Glenn, pilatreille. Elsewhere on this blog we've also posted about Pecha Kucha, which sounds similar to the 10/20/30 rule you've mentioned.
Here in the LTC Amanda has also been using and demo-ing Prezi as part of a series on Powerpoint alternatives. She's been posting those on this blog as well.
It sounds like we can do a lot better with some different uses of slideware, but as Dave points out in his post that refers to the article, Powerpoint is perhaps not the only problem.
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