Many teachers use presentations in their classrooms as a way for students to research and present information to their classmates. The most popular form of presenting this information is either PowerPoint or posters. The problem is these are usually the only two mediums students use and many don’t even use them well. There are alternatives to PowerPoint and posters out there for students to use. I recently had two students think outside the box and created a fake MySpace page for a deceased physicist using PowerPoint (Niels Bohr MySpace). What a creative way to show information! There are other alternatives such as videos, ScreenCast, VoiceCast, Jing, and as mentioned before, Scratch for younger students.
Secondly, students are not being taught how to create good presentations. How many PowerPoints have teachers seen where there are 20 animated GIF’s jumping around bright yellow font that is difficult to read and two paragraphs of text copied from Wikipedia. As teachers, our job is to not only teach research skills and public speaking skills, but also how to properly use technology to present information. Let’s think outside the box and give our students more options than the traditional ones. They have imaginations that get used less and less the further they progress in school. Many of them will be asked to be creative in the work force and college, they need to be practicing those skills in all their high school classes.
Posted by ryanewest 
