PowerPoint Effectiveness

PowerPoint is a tool that all of us are familiar with, both from creating presentations with this tool (either as a student or a teacher) and from having others use it as a presentation tool.  For this reason, we have all seen effective and ineffective PowerPoint presentations.   As future teachers, it is vital that we learn how to create only the most useful presentations for use in our classrooms.

Since I am not yet a teacher, I spoke with a friend who is teaching to determine what they are currently learning about in her second grade classroom.  She described their unit on the water cycle to me and taught me a short song she uses to help students remember the cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.  Using this information, I created a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint using the information I learned in this week’s lesson.  I then presented it to my 10 year old sister.

I was proud of how professional the PowerPoint ended up being.  I have always used background colors on my slides but had never experimented with the templates included with the software.  It really made the entire presentation appear more organized and pulled together.  I also recorded myself singing the song and included the audio on the final slides with the words written out so students could sing along.  This, coupled with some discussion questions I incorporated throughout the presentation, made the presentation more interactive without adding distracting amounts of “add-ins”.  I was also able to find a simple graphic display of the water cycle online to tie all three parts of the cycle together and show their relationships to each other.

If I could change the presentation, I would have included more slides.  I was so concerned with keeping each topic on its own slide that some slides had far too many words on them and were difficult to get through without reading some of the information off during the presentation.  I also had one slide where the white font didn’t show up as easily on the background as I thought it would, which made it difficult to read what I had written.

Overall, the PowerPoint was well received.  My sister thought it was funny to be helping her 22 year old sister with her homework for a change. J  She really enjoyed the song and is still singing it 3 days later, so I know that the interactive part was effective.  The presentation was short enough to hold her attention, but detailed enough that she was able to answer my questions and participate in the discussion I facilitated with her.  Overall, it really seemed to be effective in reinforcing her knowledge of the water cycle.

Word Processing/DTP in the Classroom

Word Processing and Desktop Publishing Software are great tools for both teachers and students in the classroom.  These are not only some of the easiest, but some of the most useful ways to incorporate technology into daily learning.  These programs make document creation must faster and more efficient.

The time and energy students save by using DTP rather than rewriting entire papers when revisions are needed provides more time for them to be creative, develop an enjoyment of writing and create higher quality work.  These types of programs enable students to do a variety of activities that reinforce their learning including creating their own books/brochures on topics covered in class, creating their own classroom newsletter/newspaper, making posters, or designing their own flashcards to study.

From a teacher’s perspective, the increased speed and ease of writing allowed by these programs results in an ability to include writing projects in other subject areas to give students further practice with his vital skill.  DTP allows for easy creation of lesson plans, parent newsletters, classroom signs, tests/worksheets, and certificates to hand out for special achievements.

Although I don’t have my own classroom yet, one specific way I hope to use desktop publishing in my classroom is through the creation of a weekly newsletter.  This will help keep both parents and students abreast of current unit topics, upcoming school events, important dates, and other information.  I can also use this as a forum to recognize individual accomplishments of students in the classroom, as well as attempt to get parents more involved their children’s learning.

For this blog, I created a mock newsletter similar to what I hope to send home with students in my future class.  When I first started, I had too many colors and too little white space, which distracted from the overall message I was trying to communicate.  I was using a variety of fonts which made the entire document look too busy.  When I revised it, I included only red and blue (Hinsdale’s school colors).  I added some WordArt to make it more visually appealing, as well as a fun picture of the students.  Using one easily readable font made the newsletter look much more polished, and some small lines divided up the page to add to the visual appeal.  The overall product appeared more professionally done after my simple revisions!

Here is my final product:

Spreadsheets/Databases in the Classroom

http://www.sabine.k12.la.us/class/excel_resources.htm#Elementary%20School

The above website is a valuable resource for teachers who plan to be instructing in a P-5 classroom.  It has links to a variety of sites with great ideas for how to utilize spreadsheets like Excel in real lessons.  From timelines to graphs to keeping track of survey results, Excel can be integrated into a wealth of common lessons.

I have done a lot of work with Excel and the Microsoft Office Suite throughout my studies, as it was a major focus in the Business School at the University of Louisville and an area in which I tutored others for years.  However, while there are obvious advantages to Excel, like organizing student information and keeping track of grades, I had underestimated how valuable it could be to teach younger children.  While the majority of my focus was on high-level Excel functions, spreadsheet productivity software can be quickly mastered and utilized by elementary school students.

I had never considered how much time and energy can be saved with a well-thought out spreadsheet activity.  If the teacher prepares a template worksheet in advance, learning time will not be wasted with such tedious tasks as data entry.  Rather than asking students to color or draw graphics, they can work more efficiently and create a more professional looking end product by using programs like Excel to graph results and visually represent relationships among variables.

I was also surprised at how quickly young students can pick up computer programs like Excel.  I would have thought that third grade students could do very little with this software, but technology is such a huge part of daily life now.  Young children are not only good at using spreadsheets and other computer programs, but they are extremely interested in learning about them in most cases.  I thought the spelling test idea was very creative, and it's a perfect example of how spreadsheets can be applied in unconventional ways beyond the typical math and economics lessons that initially come to mind.

In the past, I have used spreadsheets to create homework assignments for college students in Excel.  I have organized my grade book in Excel, as well as curved grades and experimented with different assignment weights before posting grades.  I have kept track of survey results and used market analysis software to study the results.  These are all things that will translate well to my future classes, even though I have yet to actually begin teaching.

It will be challenging to alter my way of thinking to allow younger students to utilize Excel, but I think my past experiences will serve me well in the classroom.  I am planning to start volunteering at a local elementary school next month, and it will be exciting to spend more time with younger kids to better determine how much they are capable of.  I expect to seek advice from more experienced teachers and listen to student feedback to find just the right ways to effectively introduce databases and spreadsheets into my classroom.

Intro to Technology

What I Learned:
I was glad to learn that there are national standards being implemented for both teachers and students.  These NETS are vital when you consider society's expectation that students will be technologically literate by the time they graduate.  It is the responsibility of teachers to ensure that their students are ready to become contributing members of society, and having nationally accepted initiatives makes it much more likely that students will be uniformly prepared to take on the challenges of the "real world".  Not only can technology use in the classroom benefit my students' ability to learn, but it can allow me to communicate with parents, manage my classroom, and generally work more efficiently.
How to Implement This in My Classroom:
I plan to meet these standards in my classroom by using a wide variety of technologies in my daily teaching.  To be able to model and understand up to the minute technologies, I will need to conduct frequent research, attend professional development courses, and generally seek out continuous education.  I am not yet teaching, so I don't know exactly what age my students will be or what their technological capabilities will be, but I plan to imcorporate as many types of technology into my lessons as possible.  I hope to create a class website which will allow me to communicate with parents as well as students, providing such information as a calendar of events, unit descriptions, brief tutorials, and important due dates.  Most elementary students should also be capable of mastering the Microsoft Office suite, digital cameras, and various internet resources.  Projects will require students to do a combination of traditional reading/writing as well as create PowerPoints, blogs, or brochures.
Potential Challenges:
One of the major challenges to implementing new technology in the classroom is funding.  It can be difficult to convince schools to buy new computers, software, or hardware like cameras for use in the classroom.  Another major difficulty is that some students may not have technology at home, which can make it more difficult to incorporate technology into projects or to use technology to communicate with parents.
How to Overcome These Challenges:
To meet the funding challenge, I could start by getting advice from fellow educators on how to most effectively use/learn new technologies (and which ones are most useful) to minimize the amount of requests I am making from the district.  I could also make an effort to utilize items already in the classroom or encourage students to bring items in from home for use at school, like cameras.  I could also do a fundraiser.  For the students without technology at home, I could give some time to work on projects in class and stress the importance of obtaining a library card to use the public computers.