Seth Godin shared with us that “Communication is the transfer of emotion” while discussing the proper use of PowerPoint, in his blog. In our discussion about the wonderment of PowerPoint, many possibilities were shared that helped convey many different emotions. Jodi Cooper Wentz said that she used PowerPoint as a sort of revolving bulletin board to make announcements. Many peers shared their great ideas for interactive games using PowerPoint templates, and several peers even made their own templates for games such as Jeopardy and Who Want to be a Millionaire. Students would quickly feel excited to “play” in class instead of doing traditional lecture and note taking. The great thing is that the educators are still educating and the students are still learning. Carolyn Petite gave us another creative way to use PowerPoint when she said she used to use it as a teleprompter for morning announcements. My favorite creative use of PowerPoint was an example given by Rochelle Croston when she explained how she uses the program in her special needs classroom. Rochelle uses sounds and music to help her visually impaired students relate to a lesson.
Through the many ideas shared with me through the discussion board, I learned many key points relating to the effective use of PowerPoint in the classroom. I learned the “10-20-30″ rule to help create purposeful and engaging PowerPoint slides. I learned NOT to bullet everything in my presentation. Using too many fancy and whimsical transitions will take attention away from the message. Seth Godin also warns not to use the built-in sound effects. He advises ripping relevant music from the Internet or a favorite CD to create the right mood. The bottom line is that PowerPoint is a powerful way to share information. Everyone in the educational ladder can use this user-friendly program to convey many forms of information. Lecture notes, inspirational images, announcements, reports, or just plain fun and games have all found their way into the PowerPoint platform.
I enjoyed learning about all of the fun ways to use PowerPoint. My peers are certainly creative! I would like to make one small suggestion and that would be to discuss more the just PowerPoint. The discussion topic was presentation software, but we all fell comfortably into the PowerPoint arena and forgot to look elsewhere for presentation software ideas.
Death by PowerPoint? Not anymore!
