Yesterday, I had a long and rich conversation with an English teacher from a building quite different to mine. Without knowing it, he made my heart sing when he started riffing about his concerns about Google- and Wikipedia-centered research and the perils that come when thoughtful literary analysis is over-reduced into PowerPointed bullets. (As I typed this, I realized I loved the metaphor of “over-reduced” — it made me think about reduction sauces that, if over-reduced, end up as nothing more than a blackened pan.)

Knowing that I have a couple of staff development events coming up here and elsewhere about better use of Google tools and Wikipedia, as well as how we can improve our evaluation of digital products, my brain churned for 24 hours with those ideas.  I knew I could pull some nuggets, some takeaways out of the conversation … if I just waited long enough …

Only to find that The New York Times Learning Network beat me to it.  Today, they published an awesome lesson plan that asks students to compare great orations to their PowerPoint equivalents and, from that exercise, draw conclusions about when PowerPoint is and is not effective. That’s right.  You can compare Obama’s orations to what it would look like as a deck of cruddy PowerPoint slides. Follow the links, and you can also see what the Gettysburg Address might have looked like a la Ppt:

Gettysburg Address Summary a la PowerPoint via kwout

What I love about the lesson’s approach is that instead of telling kids that all PowerPoint is bad, it asks students to consider times when traditional bullet points are effective and when they’re not.  Instead of a binary approach (do PowerPoint or ban it), it reminds us all that successful technology use lies … in how the user employs the tool.  The lesson plan’s activities give kids practice in metacognitive evaluation.  It shows but doesn’t tell.

While the lesson’s conclusion (write a paper and create a PowerPoint on the same topic; then compare) is probably more burdensome than most curricula can adopt, the lesson is strong because:

• It doesn’t just ban PowerPoint as always bad. It helps students think about appropriate tools and communication styles for the given need/audience.
• It puts kids in the evaluation seat, not the teacher.
• It asks students to think in an open-ended way.
• It includes lots of support materials, including handout of PowerPoint tips.
• It supports students as they challenge traditional thinking (yup, just like it was typical for us to take notes in spiral-bound notebooks, PowerPoint is this generation’s Typical Activity).
• It provokes social learning via conversations.

(Oh, heck. Those are bullet points.  Moving on ….)

If you’ve been looking for a way to stretch your AASL Standards thinking about self-assessments and dispositions, this might be a great one to consider.  Remember, most classroom teachers, like the one I mentioned at the top of the post, are as sick of PowerPoint as we are.  This might be a lesson that they’d be willing to squeeze in, if only to save their sanity.

Point Counter Point: How to Use (and Avoid Misusing) PowerPoint - The Learning Network Blog - NYTimes.com via kwout

But that’s not all! Check out the New York Times’ accompanying article, “Is PowerPoint in the Classroom Evil?” which starts with the stereotypical elementary “few words and some clip art” example and then morphs into a thoughtful, in-depth exploration of the many ways in which projected content can support deep and thoughtful discourse:

Is PowerPoint in the Classroom ‘Evil’? via kwout

You can follow the additional links within the clip above to find additional provocative readings about PowerPoint. In the meantime, I’m filing these articles and ideas under, “Things I wish I’d written.”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 6:25 pm and is filed under 21st Century Learning, Learning Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.