Lesson 4 Blog

            This week I learned about presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint. I think that PowerPoint is an extremely useful tool for the classroom, benefiting both teachers and students. This piece of software particularly helps in accommodating multiple intelligences as identified by Gardner. It is my experience, however, that in most schools it is rarely used by teachers for class presentations.  From what I have witnessed, most use in schools is as a student tool. By incorporating presentation software into the classroom, it will help teachers achieve NETS for teachers standards 1 through 4 by modeling digital age work and learning, and also by designing and developing digital age learning experiences among others.

       For my PowerPoint this week, I created a presentation on Kentucky Government aimed at a 4th grade level. One reason that I think most teachers do not use this program in their daily lessons is because it is very time consuming. While I did not specifically keep track of the time I spent putting this presentation together, I would estimate that I spent between five and eight hours on this project. Obviously, there is no way that a teacher with 7 different classes, or one that has a self contained classroom, could prepare a quality presentation for every subject everyday.

          Since I am not currently teaching, I gave the presentation to a group of children from my church. While there were several children who were in my target grade range; there were also younger children, including a kindergartener. Their response was generally positive. They told me that they really liked "Tommy the Thoroughbred" who raced in occasionally to ask the kids a question or to clarify a point. An adult who watched the presentation noted that I continually used "alright". I know from my undergraduate study of communication that this is called a "placeholder" and allows a speaker to mentally "catch-up." I have dealt with this issue before, particularly in informal conversation. In the future I will try to be cognizant of this and just simply be quiet when I need to think about what I want to say next.  

          The thing that I was most proud of is that, after I finished my presentation, the children seemed to have a decent understanding of the material. They asked good questions that seemed to indicate that they understood the material. I was particularly proud when a second grader asked "how many courts are in Kentucky"? This was a good question because it showed comprehension; but also because the student was on the extreme lower end of the grade range that I intended to reach.

        

     If I were to give this presentation again, I would most certainly revise my PowerPoint. Even today I wonder if I could change the wording of definitions or rearrange the order of the slides to make it flow better. I would also like to add an interactive quiz/game at the end of the presentation to formally assess my students' comprehension.  I found the educationworld.com article on how to create a quiz to be particularly informative. Before reading the article, I had not thought about using PowerPoint in that manner.