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.