PowerPoint Presentations

I personally enjoy using PowerPoint. In my opinion, it is very simple to use and provides a visual presentation that can stand alone or be used to suppliment another mode, an example of this being a speech/tutorial. After reading the Week 3 information on PowerPoints, my knowledge of this tool has been deepened. What struck me the most was the planning tools that can be used to make storyboards and outlines in Microsoft Word. This seems like such a wonderful way to introduce students to the aspect of organising their information and thinking ahead before creating their PowerPoints. I also believe that through planning a PowerPoint presentation in Microsoft Word, this may eliminate any hesitations from some students who have little knowledge of PowerPoint but are capable at using the Microsoft Word program. The only weaknesses that I gathered from these tools were that it may be slightly hard to teach students how to construct an outline because of the procedures around this. Some students may also already be very familiar with creating presentations from scratch in the PowerPoint program so they may not appreciate the benefits of planning initially.

Hyperlinking PowerPoint slides together also seems to be a very useful way of presenting information. This could be used by the teacher and would make it easy to navigate through the PowerPoint and return quickly to desired slides. I also believe that students could benefit greatly from this as well. According to their age levels and abilities, students could be scaffolded to explore the interactive PowerPoint presentation as a class or alternatively, this could be a self-lead activity that may require high student responsibility. Ultimately, I believe that PowerPoint is a wonderful resource which has many uses within a classroom context.