This post is a little late arriving. It was lost with all the easter eggs. I started working on it Thursday, but then got side tracked with work and family holiday gatherings. Now it is born again, three days after it was left for dead…
We have been talking recently about powerpoint, and the ineffective uses of it. We’ve all seen teachers literally read paragraphs of information from slides, with little to no eye contact with students. I’m proud to say I’ve never made a powerpoint presentation like this, because, prior to this semester, I’d never made one at all.
I hope that I will easily learn how to use this technology effectively, as I’ve never had it taught to me the wrong way. However, I’m still skeptical of its uses at the secondary level. Powerpoint, either sequential or interactive, can be very effective and entertaining for young children. It can be these things for high school students as well, but I fear that this will be at the expense of efficiency.
While many would agree that lectures are not particularly enjoyable, they are most certainly efficient. There is no way I know of to communicate more information in a shorter time period. For high school students, I still believe that it is a very useful means of teaching. Obviously, neither method is mutually exclusive. A class can have both. However, I wonder if interactive powerpoint presentaions, even brilliantly designed ones, can truly be implemented consistently into high school classrooms, given the vast amount of subject matter that needs to be covered during the school year.
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April 15, 2009 at 8:20 am
Stephen Ransom
Spencer, you make some great points here. I would like to push back a little though and suggest that lectures are most efficient for the lecturer. They are not highly beneficial for the K12 learner. Lecture works, but one must acknowledge its limitations with all learners, but especially with young learners. They need to be kept short and interspersed with many opportunities to test out, try, discuss, experiment, build, manipulate,… When the goal is to communicate, as you put it, “more information in a shorter period of time”, the drawbacks far outweigh the benefits in terms of understanding and retention. Finding ways to break up this efficient, but problematic information delivery is what this idea is all about. When information is packaged appropriately in a format that allows students to explore, listen, watch, observe, respond, and repeat as many times as necessary, it puts the responsibility on the learner as an active participant rather than simply a passive listener.
I totally agree with you that there are benefits that can be had in lecture format, but the younger the student, the less benefit there is. The longer the lecture, the less the benefit. And, some content simply requires something else. So, this is simply being presented as a tool to provide an alternative at times that puts the learner in charge of controlling the content. This is not something you would do every day, for sure. However, in conjunction with podcasting that we will learn about, it provides some great new ways to breath life back into the classroom.
Finally, you point out a great problem that we are facing in education today – high-stakes accountability and pressure to “cover” (not teach) a great deal of subject matter. Oh, if students were simply empty vessels to be filled. How easy teaching would be, no?
Great post and great questions for us all to consider.
April 15, 2009 at 11:10 am
Sheryl
i made a comment about this post, but some how it got posted under your face book post.