*PowerPoint is the Teachers Bread and Butter*

This week I shall present Microsoft Powerpoint as my idea of the best tool for teachers.  I understand some teachers notion that, as one has put to me, ‘Power Point has been done to death’  (meaning it has been used so much that it has been overused and has become boring to the students); however I do not think there is any escaping PowerPoint's dominance in teaching.  It is the only tool that one could say is the ‘bread and butter’ of teaching (meaning that it is the tool teachers use for presentations).  Even the teacher who made the ‘done-to-death’ remark, old and wise as he was, did actually use PowerPoint in his presentation to us.  If you are a teacher, it is most likely that you will need to be proficient in PowerPoint or an equivalent program that does the same functions (more on a tool that can do this in the final paragraph).  

During our five weeks of this Graduate Diploma all of our tutorials and lectures have been presented with a PowerPoint type of slide show (given that other companies have their equivalent of PowerPoint technology).  This is an example of how widely used PowerPoint is at our own university.  Most of the PowerPoints have been used in the old fashioned ‘chalk and talk’ method where the written words are put on screen and the tutor in-person narrates the slides.  This may display a lack of skills in Powerpoint; however, I have noticed that when a background is put on the slides they become harder to read.  Personally, I intend to become an expert in Powerpoint.  I have not used it before this unit of study, which started only five weeks ago, but I can already see the benefits of knowing how it works.  I am surprised to learn that it has so many features other than the text-on-screen that we students see with our tutorials.  The user is able to: put a narration onto the slide show and can make the slide show start and advance automatically, or have the slide show advance by the users command; video can be embedded in the slide show; animations can be put into the slide show; an interactive quiz can be put in; photos and clip art.  Powerpoint is a very powerful tool.

PowerPoint also allows high order thinking, in the parlance of Blooms taxonomy.  Students can be tasked to put a PowerPoint show together with some basic training.  This has been displayed in this weeks subject readings for ICT in Learning Design, on the Universities ‘moodle’ site, where classes have put together a virtual museum.  It seems the name, virtual museum, is rather flexible and can mean all sorts of educational presentations.  The ones on the web site, a link here (http://christykeeler.com/EducationalVirtualMuseums.html), are to do with American culture and history.  What a great resource if an Australian museum sites could be made by school students!  It would be a very relaxing way to review Australian culture and history and have great benefits to education of students and the general public alike.  Although PowerPoint is not a web 2.0 tool, students are still able to work on PowerPoint individually, or in groups, and develop presentations in accordance with a scaffold given by the teacher.  Students are able to work within Blooms (1956) cognitive processes of remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create.  Teachers are still able to be ‘Learning Managers’ and allow the students to explore their own learning with supervision.  

Figure 1: Bloom's cognitive processes.

SUBSTITUTION	·         White board/black board ·         Speaker when narration used ·         In-person presentation when used over internet ·         Old style film slides ·         Old style printed pictures
AUGMENTATION	·         Of presentation ·         Audience participation (quizzes, etc.) ·         Send via email and web page
MODIFICATION	·         Photo’s ·         Movies ·         Animation ·         Quiz
REDEFINITION	·         Glogster ·         Prezi ·         Webpage ·         Slideshow Movie Maker/Video presentation (where the video is a set of narrated stills).

Figure 2.  SAMR chart for Power Point.

Figure 2 is the SAMR chart for this weeks topic of Microsoft PowerPoint.  SAMR, as shown above, stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition.  It is a tool used for analysing a subject and, in this course, replaces other tools such as SWOT.  What do we learn from the chart?  In the first row, Substitution, we explore that PowerPoint replaces the old-style slide shows that we older people remember: film slides, put into a light projector, used to throw a large image onto the screen.  I can still remember slideshows used during my own university education that were just like the PowerPoint presentations of today.  People who have not experienced slides will likely have grandparents with film slides of photographs.  Keeping with Substitution in the SAMR chart above, PowerPoint also replaces the black-board and white board; it appears that teachers now use their text on walls exclusively with PowerPoint.  This has the advantage to the teacher that it can be saved and used from year to year; and also with behavioural management because the teacher spends less time with their back to the classroom.  PowerPoint can also completely substitute the teacher or lecturer with a narrated slide show.  This has advantages to distance education and with my own course, which is largely completely on-line even though I am a resident student.

In the Argumentation section of the SAMR model, a dot-point I would like to expand on would be audience participation.  PowerPoint can be interactive with quizzes or questions.  This makes it a more powerful learning device.

Skipping to Redefinition on the SAMR model, some expansion on the dot-points would be helpful.  With the opinion of the teacher that said ‘PowerPoint has been done to death’, mentioned earlier, alternatives such as movie maker were suggested.  An example of a movie maker presentation was shown to my class: this was a set of stills narrated with a sound-track.  This type of presentation can also be done with PowerPoint -- I therefore do not think it is a worthy substitution for PowerPoint.  Regarding the Glogster, I have viewed some examples of Glogster on the web and think they are nothing more than a tidied up web page: they seem to have all the same features and functions of a web page.  Regarding Prezi, this is a worthy competitor to PowerPoint and may catch-on in the future.  It seems to do all the same functions capable of PowerPoint and, in addition, able to zoom in on parts of the slide.  If really needing to zoom on PowerPoint, prior preparation would allow you to put in extra slides of the would-be zoomed photograph, if that is what was needed.  The fact that Prezi works from the ‘cloud’ and allows this zooming makes it a very interesting presentation tool.

As can be seen, with my limited knowledge on presentation and presentation tools, I think PowerPoint is what every teacher needs to know thoroughly.  It is the basic tool of presentations.  Prezi seems to come a close second, in my opinion.  PowerPoint may develop further, however, and outclass Prezi.  There are also other programs that are free that have (to my knowledge) the tools of PowerPoint, such as Google Slides.  Google may, in fact, overtake Microsoft with its free programs.  PowerPoint is the program of choice for teachers and that does not seem likely to change in the immediate future.

Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc.

Image of Bloom’s Cognitive Process from,

www.tidec.org