Slideshow

I have never been the biggest fan of powerpoint presentations. I always felt that it was an excuse for me to furiously copy everything and not pay any attention to a word that my teacher was saying. This can be attributed to several things. First of all, my teacher's slideshows were always long, boring, word for word accounts of what they had to say. It was like copying down the bible or something and just when you thought you were going to finish before the slide changed, it did. This left you with incomplete notes and with no way to fill in the blanks because your mind had been so set on copying that you hadn't heard a word of the lecture. Secondly, I always felt like it was a teacher's easy way out. There was no innovation in what we were learning. It showed that the teacher had given that exact same speech to every class that day and we were just mindlessly listening to it. There was no humor, room for going off to different discussions, or anything of that sort. I'm a big believer that in order to learn, students need to be having fun and powerpoint presentations are far from being fun.

Having said all of that, I do think that they can be successful if done correctly. As the video and article showed us the slides should only have talking points on them. The information should be coming from the instructor, not the slides. They are there just as a basic outline of what is going to be said. Also, the distractions are immense when words and colors start swirling and whirling around the screen. I think that the simpler the slides can be made, the better. My slideshow highlights some of the things that I would like to teach my students in my future English class. In the slides that follow I showed some of the ways that the students will be learning these tasks and next week I will be adding more in depth analysis when I add my voice to it. The final project is in depth and jumps across the many different things I want my students to learn. It will teach them to work together, use technology, critique, and write well written and thought out stories.