theconversation.com: Any university teacher who does not harbour a painful recollection of a failed lecture is a liar. On one such occasion, I felt early on that I had lost the students entirely: those who hadn’t sunk into comatose oblivion were listless and anxious. Ungracefully, I threw myself even deeper into my PowerPoint presentation to save me from total ruin. Years later, I can still hear myself reading aloud the bullet points from the overhead and see myself turning around to the students to sell these points to them.
3 comments:
YES! YES! YES! I totally agree with thins article all the way! I can not begin to tell you how many times the power point has distracted me during lecture. Here is what happens, my notes end up being solely what is on the power point. At that point the lecture that the teacher is giving, which is clearly more important than the power point, is going in one ear and out the other. So basically I am not obtaining anything from listening to this lecture. In one of my classes the teacher passes out his out line for the day to us to take notes on. This I have found is extremely helpful This is because I know what the topics that are being covered are, and there is room for me to add my own notes from the lecture. I truly encourage more teachers to go this route with their lecutres.
I quite frankly never liked when a teacher used PowerPoint to educate me on something. I understand it makes their lives and their jobs easier, but it creates a disconnect. I have found many lectures to be very unengaging because the teacher falls into the trap where they just read from their slides and never have a face to face interaction with their students. There is some gear moving in the brain connection that happens when a teacher writes what there are saying or the message they are trying to convey with the student who are taking notes. By taking the time to write on the board with the students they begin to get a sense of what is important to take notes on and have a human writing pace to keep up with rather than the speed of speech. Writing on the board of some kind also helps people begin to see the process if they are not understanding the verbal words. I will always feel that PowerPoint is a great fast way to make presentation but I don’t feel it provides any benefit in the educational setting.
The main problem with this article is that there is no clear alternative to PowerPoint that is given. The author provides the possibility of using a chalkboard, but there is not a whole lot of evidence that this really is any better than showing a process on a PowerPoint. When in an environment where many professors are doing research and do not have the time to continually innovate in their teaching. Therefore, I think that the problem is not with PowerPoint, but rather with the importance of teaching within universities. Good teachers who are prepared to lecture will be able to effectively use any tool to teach their students, so instead of attacking PowerPoint we should be focusing on redesigning education programs to ensure that teachers are teaching in a way such that students solving problems and learning in a dynamic way. While utilizing only PowerPoint is clearly not a viable way of teaching, it should not be banned when it can work as a visual aid.
Post a Comment