My students and I love PowerPoint. I make it a point NOT to read them verbatim, but I also make it a point, with rare exception, to put only basic points on the slides - usually only two or three bullets per slide - and use them to outline my lecture, and mixing them with lots of illustrations. (For example, I have a slide of Marge Simpson saying, "Aim low, kids, then you won't be disappointed!" to illustrate the concept of social comparison. I have several Dennis the Menace illustrations to demonstrate Piagetian concepts - Dennis wants his pizza cut in lots of slices because he's "really hungry," and a Family Circus cartoon showing the children watching the moon from their moving station wagon, and noting that "...the moon is following us" to illustrate egocentrism.)
Almost without exception, I've found the PowerPoint slides offered by the textbook publishers to be dry and boring. Actually, completely without exception so far. I never use the publishers' offerings. My students love my PowerPoints and often mention them positively in evaluations. I create my own, based loosely on what is in the text but adding my own material: extra -sometimes local - examples, extra photos, thought-provoking comments, reminders (to myself) about a group exercise: "Try this: With your finger, print a capital 'E' on your forehead" to illustrate high or low self-monitoring. I also give out a handout with 3 slides per page, or put them online for students to print out. This allows them to pay attention to what's happening in class, rather than scribbling furiously and asking me to repeat something so they can "get it down accurately." PowerPoint helps me in the classroom in three ways: 1. It keeps me on track. (I used to laboriously write an outline of the day's lecture on the classroom. Now I essentially have it on PowerPoint.) 2. It helps me make certain I've covered all of the concepts that I think are important, from class to class, rather than that forehead-banging thing you do after class when you've forgotten to cover something you intended to cover. 3. If you have a talker who's meandering through pointless comments, it helps a teacher like me (who is essentially a polite person who was taught it's rude to interrupt) because I can click on the next slide, which is invariably something new and different, and I can say, "That's interesting, but we need to move on." I send them online to my gmail account, then can pull them up in a classroom computer. I also bring them on a disk just in case. Beth Benoit Granite State College New Hampshire --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
