PowerPoint

Now here is a technology/program I CAN work and know how to use already. Through most of my time at high school and through university so far, PowerPoint has been a life saver to me, especially when we have been asked to do ‘dreaded’ individual or presentations. I remember I never actually got taught directly how to use PowerPoint, however over the years of using it, I slowly worked my way around the program to find different ways to fill slides and add effects to them. I remember as a kid, bored at home on a weekend I would often enjoy making little PowerPoint presentations of random ideas and stories to show my family. I was fascinated with the endless possibilities I could create and the many different pictures, colours and animations I could make using this program. Of course, I did occasionally encounter some problems and technical glitches while working on it (such as not being able to move something how I wanted to, the program freezing on me, or somehow just magically losing what I had just wrote). Even with the small problems I have encountered a few times, PowerPoint has proved to me, to be such a great tool to use for my personal studies and as well as in schools for students to create different projects and presentations.

Through looking around the internet for information about powerpoint itself (because technically I didn’t know much background information about it, apart from that it was automatically on my computer when I installed the windows office package), I came across the ‘PowerPoint in the Classroom’ website. “PowerPoint is a high-powered software tool used for presenting information in a dynamic slide show format. Text, charts, graphs, sound effects and video are just some of the elements PowerPoint can incorporate into your presentations with ease. Whether it's a classroom lesson, a parents' group meeting, a teachers' seminar or an unattended kiosk at the Science Fair - PowerPoint shows you how to make a powerful impression on your audience.” (ACT360 Media Ltd, 2007). I was quite impressed with how this website gave so much information about PowerPoint itself and step by step instructions of how to do/complete different things in the PowerPoint program. It not only has information dedicated just for teachers, but also easy, step by step instructions with diagrams suitable for even younger students to follow (ideally with the aid of a teacher). To be able to incorporate PowerPoint in the classroom and teach students how to use it properly, this site would be fantastic to use in a classroom. Lessons incorporating PowerPoint also have potential to reach out to many different learning styles and appeal to students because it can be a fun way to present different information and projects to an audience.

Looking and thinking about what I thought was quite a simple program that I use on a regular basis, instead is now to me, much more than that. It is such an important tool that is so readily available to many students/people that have access to a computer. As teachers, I do believe we need to be finding ways to utilise some programs like PowerPoint, that on the surface may seem so simple and not necessarily very important, or in way, ‘outdated’. However, when used in many different ways for many different purposes, they offer great learning tools and resources for us and our students that are not necessarily based solely around ‘internet technologies’. We need to use all programs and resources that are available to benefit our students and to expose them to as much knowledge and hands on experience as possible.

REFERENCE

ACT360 Media Ltd. (2007). Powerpoint in the classroom. Retrieved July 25, 2009, from http://www.actden.com/pp