The power of the point.

I have had quite a lot of experience using PowerPoint during my time at school and at University, and I believe that it is an incredibly important and useful teaching tool. It is possible to use powerpoint to engage students with course material and retain focus throughout a class or a lecture. At the same time, however, if not used correctly they can be distracting and cause more of a hinderance than an actual useful tool.

Before getting into how I feel they can be used within classrooms, I thought I would make a quick list of common mistakes found in PowerPoint presentations. These are often the pivot point within the presentation that will turn it from a useful and engaging tool into a distraction. I've compiled this list from videos on youtube and moodle as well as my own personal experience.

Chloes 5 points to a powerful presentation!
1) Make sure the colour scheme DOES NOT clash and that your points are easy to read.
2) Do not have too many slides.
3) Do not use useless data just for the sake of having another graph present.
4) Only use animation where needed, and do not overload the slides with it.
5) Only put a small sentence on each point you wish to make on the slide. Do not overload a slide with information and do not use useless bullet points.

Within a classroom, powerpoint can be used as a really good presentation method. There is also the possibility for students to use powerpoint within their own assignments. Allowing a child to make a presentation, which would then be presented to the class, is a highly effective way of increasing engagement with the content. Not only would a student need to understand the content in order to make the presentation, but they would also need to be confident enough in their understanding to present their information to the class as a whole. This would also help with public speaking exercises.

I also feel that PowerPoints would be useful as a tool for explanation of sequences. Putting a presentation up of steps that need to be followed during a practical class would help the students with their constructing and shaping of procedural knowledge. A step by step guide would also be highly useful for highlighting errors, pitfalls and variations in the process.

With the new technologies uses in classrooms now, there is also the added bonus of using PowerPoints on smart boards. Below is a quick video outlining some of the features that are most useful within a classroom. I particularily think the addition of notes or drawings made on the presentation being saved is most beneficial and could be used to help you reflect on the class at the end of the day. It would also help for continuing improvement of presentations as you would be able to remember what was lacking.

Avatars and Voki

I have now embedded a voki into my blog on the right as well as showing it here.


Get a Voki now!




This voki was very easy to make and I can see how it would be a useful teaching tool. Using the Voki site it was a step by step set up for a very useful tool.

Within a classroom this type of tool could be used to engage students and to help communicate ideas. Different types of learners may actually get more out of a topic by having to prepare vokis or avatars as a presentation piece. It would also be a useful way of using a prop or another voice in a classroom as we all know the same teachers voice can become monotonous at times!

I did have a few problems with the coding to get it into the blog though, and I found this youtube video to be of great help.

Aggregators not so aggrevating!

The learning activity of aggregators was incredibly useful to me. Without knowing it I had already amassed a fair few numbers of subscribed blogs on my reader but now that I know what I'm doing and where to find it, it all seems too easy!

To have everything on one page, to read as though going through an email inbox is really convient. I also found it quite easy to set up which is always a plus when dealing with technology.

I found the video that Scott placed on moodle to be really informative.



It helped clear up why we need to use these aggregators in the first place. I must admit I was going through everyones blogs to see if I had missed anything new, and in turn getting a bit stressed at the time I was seemingly wasting! As many of you on this course will attest, time is not really a luxury right now!

I do feel that aggregators would be an excellent teaching tool. Blogs themselves have been seen to be useful teaching techniques and with added aggregators I can just imagine the information a student would be able to gather.

I think that as part of my teaching, especially with the later years (10-12), I will definitely use blogs and aggregators as a method of research for them, and for information I find interesting on the subject I am teaching. Think of the paper you will save and then added information you could give your students access to!

Another idea that springs to mind is demonstrating the wide range of information that is available. For example if I were teaching a unit on human biology, in particular the heart, I would encourage my students to do some searching for blogs and new feeds on this subjet. I would tell them to follow it for a month or so and then come together in small groups to collate what they have found. As part of an assessed portion of the course, they could then present to the class this new information. I think that it would be a brilliant way of seeing the different sites and methods that students access on the web, for example http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com or http://medicineworld.org/blogs/heart/heart-watch-blog.html would give the student information from a more medical view point which they could follow compared to http://www.embraceyourheart.com/blog/ or http://www.whomagoo.blogspot.com
which give more social concepts and ideas on the subject.

The use of a tool like this would definately be a way to encourage Engagement Theory, as described by Kearsley and Shneiderman (1999). It would aid students in being more involved in their learning by use of group work with a project base and relating to them as humans (or to humans in general).

Blogs and aggregators would also be a good method of relating Lynchs 8 learning management questions in the classroom. By letting your students blog about what they already know, help them find sources of information for subjects that they want to know and looking at what resources you have at your disposal you have covered LMQ 1, 2 and 4 in one simple task (Smith et al 2003).

One downfall I can see with aggregators is finding sites to subscribe to! I know from personal experience that I must limit my searching online as I tend to get caught in a whirlwind of interesting sties and information and stray away from the subject I'm looking for. This would definately be a shaping issue (DOL 2) that I would address with my students as a common error or pitfall.


References:

Kearsley,G. & Shneiderman, B. (1999) Engagement Theory: A framework for technology-based learning and teaching. [http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm]

Smith, R., Lynch, D. & Mienczakowski, J. (2003). "The bachelor of learning management (BLM) and education capability", Change: Transformations in Education, (6)(2): 23--37