Is PowerPoint useful??

I had two teachers in high school use PowerPoint. They both used it effectively. One taught economics. The other taught leadership and ethics. They used the slides as a way to focus our attention on the point of the lesson. They did not read from the slides, or have extraneous features that distracted from their message. Also, they did not use PowerPoint presentations everyday. I think that this is important. Anything can get old. PowerPoint is not appropriate for every lecture either. They did a good job of choosing when the lecture would be improved by using slides to focus the attention of the class. Additionally, they taught us how to make PowerPoint presentations. We were required to give a presentation to the class, using the pointers that they had given us.

Their pointers have helped me to learn to streamline what I want to put on the slides and to use the slides as a springboard for discussion. Once you put a slide that has a lot of words, students start copying and stop listening. I think it is more beneficial to put up a few words and pictures that will help the students understand the point. Giving a visual can also help start discussion without the students even having to read anything. I have used PowerPoint presentations to share images with students without using any text. I found this successful in focusing the students' attention and promoting discussion.

Univeral Design for Learning

Universal design relates to learning in the same way that it relates to architecture. When building accessibility is an afterthought for the architect, the aesthetics of the building suffer, while accessibility is often inadequate. When equal access to learning for all students is tacked onto a curriculum, it is often difficult for the teacher and does not succeed in helping students learn. Just as in an architectural plan, when universal design is incorporated into a curriculum it becomes an integral part that achieves its goal. In UDL (Universal Design for Learning) the goal is to provide access to learning for all students. If teachers are flexible with their materials and methods for instruction by designing curriculum with universal design as the framework, all learners will benefit, which saves time and energy in the end.

I have definitely taught many lessons that have caused me to scramble to help all of the students understand. I have also had to reteach in a more appropriate format. However, I have also planned lessons with each student's needs in mind that have been much more successful. For example, I made a PowerPoint about Native Americans. I gave the students each a note-taking sheet; however, because I knew that many of my students had trouble taking notes, I gave them each a note-taking sheet that was appropriate for them. By labeling the sheets with each student's name on his or her paper in advance, I was able to pass out the papers without the students paying attention to the fact that they had different papers, a common problem in our class. I gave the students that had trouble taking notes a sheet that was partially filled out. For all the students, I put lines on the paper because, while not all of them required lined paper to take notes, some of them needed it; yet, it helped all of the students to write more neatly. Doing all of this planning in advance took a little bit more time before the lesson, but saved a lot of time after the lesson.

Center for Technology and Teacher Education

The CTTE website provides information about new educational technology, as well as about the current research that their group is doing. The website also provides ideas and guidelines for all content areas (math, science, social studies, and English). While the links vary for each content area, in general, lesson plans, web links, and other resources are provided. The application that I found the most useful was the science content area activities that integrate technology, which was divided into chemistry, biology, earth science, physical science, and physics. Each category has multiple lesson plan ideas that may be downloaded. One of the chemistry lessons that I really liked had the students use an Excel spreadsheet to graph each element's position in the periodic table and its melting and boiling points. By using a graph students are given a good visual of periodic table trends for the different phases of matter, a concept that may be difficult to understand without a graph.