Our old friend Microsoft’s PowerPoint is approaching 20 years old (it was first released in 1990). Can you remember the first time you put together a PowerPoint presentation? You thought you were on the top of the technology world. Well, time and technology has marched on. While PowerPoint is still a viable presentation product, let’s look at some options and start the conversation about how to best present content in the classroom.

Non-Interactive Presentations (PowerPoint)

Since 1990 we have sat through many PowerPoint presentations and have likely given many PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint used properly is still a viable presentation tool, but it can also be lethal, hence the saying “Death by PowerPoint”.

Some of the more common mistakes made in PowerPoint presentations are:

• Too much text information on one slide
• Too many different page transitions and animations used to add objects to a slide.
• The presentation is basically pages of notes to keep the presenter on topic. Why not keep your note in front of you and use the screen for graphics and illustrations?

This biggest drawback of a typical PowerPoint presentation is that it does not naturally include the audience’s input. It takes a talented presenter to keep the audience engaged during typical a PowerPoint presentation.

Interactive Presentations

PowerPoint has been given a reprieve with the new add-ons that make it an interactive presentation tool. Two of the more popular products are Quizdom and TurningPoint.

We use TurningPoint at GTC,C where I teach; however, I have had a chance to use both in the past and my nod goes to TurningPoint.

TurningPoint is a true PowerPoint add-on. When you install TurningPoint it puts a tool bar at the top of your PowerPoint application. You then add interactivity to your existing PowerPoint slides by simply clicking on the TurningPoint tools in the tool bar.  You can add all types of questions and polls directly to any slide and the audience interacts with these slides with their response unit (like show in the image).

This system is relatively inexpensive to deploy since the software and USB receiver (also shown in the image) used on the instructor’s computer costs about $200. While you can buy enough response units for all the students, there is a clever “book store” program. You can have the book store sell these units directly to the students. They are not particularly expensive (approximately $25) and then you don’t have to give out the units and take them back up in every class. This also means you don’t have to find the funds in the department’s budget to buy the response units.

By making a presentation interactive, the students will pay closer attention to the presentation. Consider this scenario. You state in the course syllabus that 10% of the final grade comes from an average of all presentation embedded questions. If they are not paying attention and do not know the answers to the questions in the presentations this cuts into their grade. This is all easy to pull off since the software will automatically score all answers and place all presentation results into a grade book program.

Annotated Handout

This is a technique I often use, especially if I hand out supplemental information that I want to go over in class.

I will take the handout material and convert it to a PDF document. I then use the Acrobat PDF program (not the free PDF Reader) and annotate the key points. While Acrobat offers a full suite of annotation tools, I like to use the highlight annotation tool. This tool make it looks like you highlighted the test using a regular yellow highlighter.

The students know the highlighted information that I have highlighted is key information that I expect them to know and they will likely see it on a test one day. Most of them bring a highlighter to class and mark up their copy of the handout to match my annotation. This is a sneaky way to keep them engaged in the presentation. They also can make any additional notes right in the margins of the paper.

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In Summary

What are you using to make your presentations interactive? Post your comments to this page and lets start a converastion about this, so we can all learn how to be a better teacher.