New Perspective on PPT

When PowerPoint first came out, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. What a wonderful program to use for my lectures to my students! Instead of paper outline notes for them to fill in and transparencies of pictures, I could create a slideshow which could make the text dance and swirl and the pictures fade in and out. I wasn't tied to my overhead; I could walk around the classroom and give my special needs students a non-verbal cue to pay attention.

Of course, now most of us are sick of PPT; the newest has worn off. Now we want youtubes. We want sounds, voices and movement in our presentations. But videos take hours to create and I do not have the hours to spend on a 2-3 minute video.

In Dr. Barton's class, he encouraged us to just use pictures without text when we presented using PowerPoint. My first experience with this method annoyed me; I spend the whole time trying to figure out why Dr. Barton used the picture he did instead of listening to his words. When I presented my reading, I used some text and pictures explaining that I was a visual learner and needed to see the words in order to remember the content.

Last semester I created a PPT explaining the concepts of logos, ethos, and pathos - all text, no images. My students took notes and listened, but many of them did not use the concepts when they wrote their rhetorical analysis. So this semester I added some images to the PPT and broke large chunks of text into small chunks. I used an image of building blocks to illustrate deductive logic and a trivial pursuit pie playing piece to explain inductive logic. My students still took notes, but I think the concepts "clicked" in their brains better. Now they have an image to remember with the text. Perhaps I could find a song to go with this presentation. If only some clever instructor will soon post a youtube on logos, ethos, and pathosthen I can steal it :) or create a link to it.