Powerpoint: powerful, simple and accessible

This week we kept adding to our digital tool box. However, this time we revisited an old and very familiar tool: Powerpoint. I had never really looked at Powerpoint as a program beyond a presentation program. We had the opportunity to see that Powerpoint is a simple and efficient way to “spice up” our lessons and also to use as part of our lessons. It is quick to load, potentially accessible in most schools in our province and also very helpful in creating good digital content. PowerPoint is a program that is possibly very familiar for most students; therefore, they won’t spend any time trying to figure out the program itself, but rather they’ll spend that time producing the content that we are trying to ask them to produce. It’s a “win-win” kind of scenario. I do hope that Michael’s campaign (#MakeSlidesFunAgain) takes off.

We also touched on the “Multimedia Learning Hypothesis”. Although we do learn more deeply from words and pictures together than just words, as a class, we concluded that we need a way to interact and practice with the new material in order to really consolidate and understand new material. Additionally, we talked about the idea of a “dual coding theory,” where we use two separate channels for processing information (auditory and visual channels), and how we, as educators, could adopt this into our classroom in an effective way.

I look forward to familiarizing myself with Prisma, Mirror Lab and Comica some day soon.