PowerPoint Vs Gifted Students: Part I
Image by Garethjmsaunders
Power corrupts.
PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Edward Tufte
PowerPoint Is Evil
While I don’t share Edward Tufte’s view completely anti-PowerPoint stance, I have been seriously reconsidering my use of PowerPoint in a gifted classroom. As a computer science major and technology nut, I’ve always been eager to utilize PowerPoint for my students’ benefit. But until I started reading some research, I never actually considered what those benefits were. This series is a public version of an inner conflict I’ve been wrestling with.
Default Powerpointing
If you’re like me, you approach PowerPoint in the way that PowerPoint likes to be approached. That is, you accept the default settings and pick common templates. Because of the program’s default templates, you create slides that look like these:
- Bulleted lists
- Short phrases
- Outline of topics
- Little content (compared to an overhead transparency)
When you present, it might look like this:
- Lights are off
- Slides go in sequential order
- Speaker reads out what is on the slide
- Audience watches with little interaction
Characteristics of Gifted Learners
With the idea of a typical PowerPoint presentation in your mind, consider some common characteristics of a gifted learner:
- Bored with predictability
- Intuitively understand ideas
- Thrives on complexity
- Manipulates information easily
- Interconnects ideas
Typical PowerPoint use does not meet the needs of gifted students!
PowerPoint & Gifted Students’ Needs
The bullet-point heavy style of PowerPoint’s default templates leads to presentations focused on details but lacking in relationships between ideas. There is an undeniable draw to list fact after fact.
But this is not how gifted learners learn best!
Gifted students understand concepts in a whole-to-part manner. This is why we create generalizations, big ideas, and themes.
Gifted learners are intuitive and thrive on patterns and generalizing. These needs are not being met by slides after of bullet points.
PowerPoint’s Problems
Too Sequential
PowerPoint makes it difficult to access slides out of order when requested by the audience. Consider how responsive you can be when teaching using an overhead compared with PowerPoint. Being able to jump around encourages discussion and an active audience. PowerPoint, when used in its default manner, creates a lecture-like atmosphere.
This factor may contribute to a tendency to defer questions to the end of the presentation rather than to jump to another slide to respond to a question in the middle, thus reducing the speaker’s responsiveness to the audience.
Yates and Orlikowski
The PowerPoint Presentation and Its Corollaries
Too Constrained
PowerPoint causes us to break up our lessons into chunks based on the size of a slide, rather than what’s best for learning. Information becomes isolated, not interconnected. The big picture becomes lost. And so may our gifted students.
The software makes us think and speak in isolated blocks, instead of in coherent context, totalities, narratives or linear reasoning.
[PowerPoint] encourages us to squeeze all information into fixed formats and templates and present it in relentless sequence.
Jens E. Kjeldsen
The Rhetoric of PowerPoint
Too Fast
When everything is pre-typed, there is a tendency to fly through information. While this may ease the tension for nervous presenters, it encourages teachers to simply present information rather than teach in the way that is easiest to comprehend.
Students are easily overwhelmed with information that they may falsely assume is being digested.
W.R. Klemm,
Computer Slideshows: A Trap For Bad Teaching
Result: A Lesson Designed Around PowerPoint?
When using PowerPoint, slides are designed around PowerPoint, presentations are designed around PowerPoint, and the environment is designed to work around PowerPoint.
This leads to a problem in relation to good communication and teaching because the rhetorical and pedagogical choices the speaker ought to make in the concrete situation have already been made automatically by the software.
Jens E. Kjeldsen
The Rhetoric of PowerPoint (emphasis mine)
Next Time: Beyond The Defaults
Is PowerPoint all bad? Should we shove it aside and work solely with “old-fashioned” technology? Absolutely not. But let’s make sure we’re not letting software make our teaching choices for us. Next time, we’ll at going beyond PowerPoint’s defaults to better meet the needs of our gifted students.
Great, well supported summary. Thanks for sharing!
A good argument to allow students to use powerpoint for only one product during the year rather than using it as a default product. Students should know how the program works as many businesses (including Shell Oil) use it to communicate their data/work. But we shouldn't rely on the program to be the only way we show what we know. So much creativity is lost because students opt for the 'easy' way of presenting their information throughPowerpoint.
Wonderful tour of the inherent problems with PPT and its ubiquitous templates. FYI: 3 of your reference links are broken, & I believe your advice could apply to a more general audience beyond the gifted student. I'd love for you to critique my presentation on the same subject: http://bit.ly/nMh3G
I'm interested in seeing your next post.
I agree with the issues you list regarding teacher use of ppt but blame the person and their expectations more than the software (which can and does play its part). What I don't see is overheads as a better solution. They seem to have many of the same issues (especially with people using pre-printed transparencies in what amounts to a ppt format).
A lot of it comes down to intent and choice for me. The teacher ought to be giving considerable thought to what content is delivered well in a presentation format and what is not. Sadly, the issue seems to be that ppt has become the swiss army knife of content delivery and it is not even a spork.
Thanks for the feedback.
The software definitely has its uses, which I'll be exploring in the next couple of articles.
Regading overheads, I think they're simply faster and more flexible, although certainly not when pre-printed. A transparency can be moved around, set at portrait or landscape, and allows for student input as I build it. They can then be displayed on a wall, brought back later and modified for further lessons. Best of all, I can make cool drawings
Of course, all of these things are possible with PowerPoint, they're just simpler with a transparency.
It truly is about choosing the best format and I'll be addressing that this week. I love your spork analogy!
Thanks for pointing out the broken links! Lazy copy and pasting on my part. They're fixed now.
This can absolutely apply to a more general audience, I'm simply concentrating on the issues in a gifted classroom.
Will check out your link. Appreciate the feedback!
Wow! Very good idea. Will definitely implement this in the (quickly!) approaching school year. Thanks a ton for the suggestion
Ian, Also check out Beyond Bullet Points. It removes some of the boredom of ppt.
I actually read that recently. Great ideas for improving ppt.
I actually read that recently. Great ideas for improving ppt.