Thursday, March 29, 2001

tech.life@school | Joyce Kasman Valenza

PowerPoint effective, but often misused

There are days when I feel like a prisoner of PowerPoint. At a recent educational technology conference, I discovered I was not the only one.

For the uninitiated, PowerPoint is presentation software that uses design templates and offers users a library of media elements. Bundled with Microsoft Office, PowerPoint is ubiquitous. You'll find it in classrooms, lecture halls, workshops and boardrooms.

You'll also find audiences suppressing yawns as they watch "screenbeans" and bullets fly across tired templates crowded with text. Similarly, among the elementary and middle-school set, few can go a day without a glimpse of HyperStudio's Addy the dog. (While these products can be used standalone to create looping displays or electronic resumes, they are most commonly used as visual aids for speakers.)

After an advanced PowerPoint workshop at the recent Connected Classroom Conference in New York, teachers shared with me a litany of multimedia horror stories. They, too, were trapped. Sitting in classrooms, they were forced to watch dozens of presentations with deafening sound effects, tired clip art, dizzying designs, shoddy documentation, and presenters reading information from overcrowded slides. They complained of "templated thought" and of flash replacing content.

The problem is not the software. When used creatively, these open-ended multimedia production programs are fabulous tools for communicating information and for motivating and engaging learners. Learning to make effective presentations is a critical skill.

These early presentation efforts are the forerunners of speeches that our students will eventually make to their clients, PTOs, corporate boards, and religious groups. The problem is not in the program but in its common misuse by inexperienced presenters. Though students may thoroughly enjoy producing multimedia, the PowerPoint is not the project. It is an assistant, a tool.

"Multimedia presentations may be compelling and persuasive," Jamie McKenzie writes in the September issue of his respected e-journal, From Now On, at http://fno.org. "Or they may be glib and disappointing. In the worst case, students will devote more attention to special effects than they will spend on the issues being studied. PowerPointing can become a goal in itself - an unfortunate example of technology being done for technology's own sake. . . . "PowerPointlessness [a term McKenzie encountered on a trip to Australia] is a problem that reaches beyond schools into the business world."

How can we prevent classrooms from become PowerPointless? Can we inject any magic bullets into students' multimedia efforts?

Allow me to present some insights I have gathered over multiple years of multimedia:

• Ask students to prepare storyboards first. Teachers can use storyboards as "in-process" assessment tools, to avoid disastrous final products that are not logically structured or don't deliver the message.
• Make the slide show only one component of the student project. Ask students to develop their presentations after the persuasive essay or the position paper is completed. Ask students to consider their slides a summary, or an abstract, of a larger product. And remind them to consider essential questions rather than "everything they know about X."
• Encourage students to create original art. Student drawings and digital photographs pack far more punch than screenbeans or Addy clips. Students may spend hours searching for an image of a flower when they could far more effectively draw one or shoot one with a digital camera. When they must use clip art, show students how to use it creatively, by combining it with other elements - for instance, incorporating clever thought bubbles.
• Encourage minimal use of sounds and animations. Reserve them for emphasizing important points.
• PowerPoint is more powerful in the hands of a powerful presenter. Insist that students practice their presentations - that they engage the audience by making frequent eye contact, displaying enthusiasm, and by telling stories. Personal anecdotes and clever examples are far more compelling than bullets, no matter how they fly in.
• Insist that students respect copyright by citing every piece of media they use, other than copyright-free clip art. Unless items are cited throughout, the last slide should list works consulted, no matter how informal the presentation. Teachers must be familiar with Fair
• Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia, at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/mtss/fairuse/guidelinedoc.html, which sets limits for the amount of borrowed material acceptable for use in student and teacher products.
• Encourage simplicity. Leave words out; summarize rather than cram. Limit the number of points per slide, so the audience does not struggle to keep up. Unless students are quoting, paragraphs have no place in their presentations. All bullets should be readable from the back of the room. Combinations of upper- and lower-case letters are the most readable. Spelling errors look even worse when projected! Proofread like crazy.
• The medium should match the message. Students should choose a consistent look that enhances rather than detracts from their theme. All slides and transitions should look as if they are part of the same presentation. Students should understand both the message and the audience, adjusting text and art accordingly. A presentation on the Holocaust would not be effective with a cute font and silly cartoons.
• Videotape and show models of excellent student work as exemplars. Students may not intuitively know what an excellent presentation looks like.
• Use rubrics to describe to students what you expect. Develop those assessment tools with your students so they are more invested in the creation of good products or use some examples of multimedia rubrics listed below. If evidence of solid research is the most important component of the presentation, value it heavily in your rubric.

An old friend once offered me this piece of advice, and I keep it in mind whenever I present:

"Consider every presentation as a valuable present, a gift for your audience. What you give them should change them in some way." There are no magic bullets.

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Joyce Kasman Valenza is the librarian at Springfield High School in Erdenheim, Pa. Her column appears each week in tech.life. E-mail: joyce.valenza@phillynews.com.

Rubrics on the Web

HyperStudio Project Rubric http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/score/actbank/thyperstu.htm

Kathy Schrock's Assessment Page http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/assess.html

Oral Presentation Rubric (Prentice Hall) http://www.phschool.com/professional_development/assessment/rub_oral_presentation.html

Multimedia Grading Rubric http://www.learningspace.org/instruct/lessons/pst4.html

Multimedia Mania 2001 http://www.ncsu.edu:80/midlink/rub.multi.htm

Multimedia Project Rubric http://www.ncsu.edu:80/midlink/rub.mmproj.htm

Multimedia Project Rubric http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink/rub.senst.htm

Presentation Rubric http://www.ncsu.edu:80/midlink/rub.pres.html

Project-Based Learning With Multimedia http://pblmm.k12.ca.us/PBLGuide/MMrubric.htm

Project-Based Learning Checklists http://www.4teachers.org/projectbased/checklist.shtml

Rubric for an Oral Presentation http://www.servtech.com/~germaine/rubric.html

Rubric for Multimedia Presentation: PowerPoint http://www.ga.k12.pa.us/curtech/WEBQPRE/assesspp.htm

Scoring PowerPoints http://fno.org/sept00/powerpoints.html

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