This week, personal and university assessment related time constraints meant that I couldn’t look at the material for Week 5 until later in the week. When I saw that this week focused on presentation tools and specifically PowerPoint, I felt relieved. I have used PowerPoint on many occasions so I thought that I would be able to produce the evidence of technical skill required and talk about the technical features of the program very easily. Needless to say, my exploration into PowerPoint and the use of it as a multimedia authoring tool did not go to plan and I was challenged, frustrated and inspired all at once. Prior to this week, my experience with PowerPoint has been purely as a presentation tool to support oral presentations. In this sense, it is a functional, practical and universal platform where a number of slides can be loaded with key points or information to support the author’s presentation. It can also be shared afterwards as take home notes. This week, I was challenged to use PowerPoint in a different way. I was challenged to think about how I could use it to engage contemporary learners, to target the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and to use it to redefine learning experiences in the classroom. I chose to create a two part experience to try a number of new tools. The first part of my example is a video presentation in which I created a number of information slides and embedded an audio file to accompany the text. The second part of my example was an interactive quiz based upon the content in the video to test the student’s comprehension of the knowledge.
To begin my exploration, I carried out tasks I had done numerous times. I set up a new Presentation and formatted the blank slides. PowerPoint provides a myriad of formatting options; background colours, themes, text colours, fonts, effects and layouts. If a student has formatted a Microsoft Word document, then they would be easily able to create and format a PowerPoint presentation. The functions are set out in the same way and are very similar. PowerPoint provides a handy option of applying some functions such as background, themes and layouts to all of the slides in a presentation at once rather than having to amend each individual slide. This is time saving as well as enabling the author to achieve a consistent looking presentation. I added my content into the presentation and then started to set up the animations for each slide. Depending on the extent of animation required, this can be time consuming. The slides can be further enhanced by adding images, shapes, charts and tables. It is also possible to embed objects such as Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, Adobe Acrobat files or other PowerPoint presentations. Videos and audio can also be added which can assist in building engagement with the learning tool. Adding audio to my presentation is where I encountered my main issue with this task. I initially used the Record Audio option in the PowerPoint menu bar and the microphone on my laptop, however upon listening back to my recording, I was not happy with the quality of it. There was lots of background static and it would have been distracting to play alongside the content. I re-recorded the audio using my phone and then emailed the audio file to my laptop. When I attempted to insert the audio, PowerPoint alerted me to the fact that the audio wasn’t in the correct file type. After correcting this using an online converter, I finally managed to get the audio into my presentation. At this point, you can either choose to have the audio running across all of the slides or you can trim the audio on each slide to reflect the slide’s content. I initially set mine up the latter way. I split the audio file across each individual slide and set my timings accordingly. Once set up though, I encountered some issues in the way it played back so decided to re-do the audio so that it played across all of the slides. This allowed me to achieve the outcome I was after. At this point, I embedded the presentation into my blog using authorSTREAM. Once it had loaded, I played it back but to my dismay the timings of the audio file and the animations did not match up as they did when I set them in PowerPoint. After numerous attempts to rectify this, I found information on the authorSTREAM website which informed me that “We do have sync problem in some cases. We are working to fix the problem”. (authorSTREAM, 2010) This is disappointing and raises a possible issue with embedding PowerPoint into a website. Political Parties PowerPoint
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In the second example I created, I explored using hyperlinks to create a quiz and assess the student’s knowledge from the first example. I found this very easy to set up as I used text boxes to create the ‘button’s’ and then use the ‘Action’ function to hyperlink the buttons to the relevant slides. I was very happy with the result and I feel like an interactive quiz created on PowerPoint could be a very useful formative assessment tool to use with students. It is fun to use for the students and would enable them to access the quiz as many times as they need to in order to revise.
Due to the offline nature of PowerPoint, it does not raise any safety issues for student use in the classroom. Internet access is not required and therefore students are not exposed to inappropriate material or commenting from outside members of the community. Students can easily reference their work when creating a PowerPoint presentation as they can include a reference page at the end or reference images etc. on each relevant slide.
Because of the many ways that PowerPoint can be used, I believe it is an asset in the classroom and can effectively be used to target all the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy: from knowledge through to evaluation. As an easy to use tool, students can use it as a multimedia creation program and it can become high end digital pedagogy which is integral to the learning experience. When considering both Bloom’s Taxonomy and the SAMR Model, PowerPoint could be used in the following ways in the classroom:
In conclusion, PowerPoint is easy to use and widely available and is a tool that presents a variety of options for use in the classroom in ways that will target higher order thinking and high level digital pedagogy. REFERENCES authorSTREAM. (2010). Converting ppt to video. Retrieved from http://www.authorstream.com/Forum/messages.aspx?TopicID=201 Jones, A.M. (2003). The use and abuse of PowerPoint in Teaching and Learning in the Life Sciences: A Personal Overview. Retrieved from https://www.csun.edu/~vceed002/ref/presentation/powerpoint/powerpoint_use_abuse.pdf
1 Comment
Naomi Birmingham
13/4/2017 02:45:38 pm
Hi Carly
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AuthorMy name is Carly. I'm currently studying a Graduate Diploma of Learning and Teaching (Secondary) through Central Queensland University. ArchivesCategories |