Well, dear readers, I'm sorry about the hiatus from blogging. I've done my best to make my first winter break as a teacher not only a physical break from school, but also a mental vacation. And it's worked -- I've had a relaxing and invigorating week and a half. Nevertheless, real life beckons. One of my New Year's resolutions is to blog regularly -- we'll see how that works out.
2009 was a great year, but I'm confident that 2010 will be an improvement in every possible way. In other words, I will make 2010 a better year.
At any rate, I came across this excellent blog post about "Why Learning From Powerpoint Lectures Is Frustrating." The writer, a college junior, explains why Powerpoint instruction irritates her:
1. Instructors tend to teach quickly when they use Powerpoint. The time it takes to write something on the chalkboard or whiteboard is no longer a rate-limiting factor.
2. Instructors tend to leave visuals on the board until they need to free up that board space for something else, which gives students more time to copy notes and comprehend concepts. On the other hand, students cannot glean information from a slide once the instructor has moved on.
3. This results in a tendency among students to frantically copy everything on a slide before the information vanishes, at the expense of listening to the infinite wisdom of the instructor.
I rely heavily on Powerpoint for my instruction, so this post got me thinking...
I agree that lessons involving math are best taught on a board. Solving equations is often key to understanding a given mathematical concept -- and the process of solving equations is more intuitively thought through in stepwise fashion rather than seeing an entire solution on one Powerpoint slide. On the other hand, biology is an inherently visual subject, especially at an introductory level. There is no way my hand drawings on the board in a single color of chalk or Expo marker could do justice to a topic like cell organelles.
Also, for some reason, changing slides appears to be a good way to get my students to snap to attention. (Well, crawl to attention might be a more accurate expression.)
Yet, are they learning? I find that my students are more apt to copy every little thing that's written on the slides rather than pay attention to my explanations. As a result, they lack a key level of comprehension. I suppose I can make the text on my slides more scarce, thus forcing my students to listen to me, but I don't know how well that would work. They are pretty well trained to copy what they see in front of them. Most of them will vigorously deny that they are audial learners (which is totally untrue, given the absurd amount of TV they watch).
Anyway, that's my jumble of thoughts. This is really just what I need -- another reason to be insecure about how I teach.
Whatever, 2010's going to be a better year. I know it.
Via CarolynBlogs (via the AP Bio listserv)
This is why I don't take notes from ppt lectures. Just listen and then download the presentation later for reference.
ReplyDeleteAny professor that does not make their slides available, either by download or hardcopy is stupid and the college junior you referenced should transfer.
As usual, Tim is wrong. Sometimes I'm convinced that Powerpoint will be the downfall of civilization. It's so often used recklessly. =)
ReplyDeletePowerpoint lectures totally suck, especially in math, as you said. MIT's introductory physics course is truly awful and widely despised by management, music, and physics majors alike. It is taught almost exclusively in powerpoint. Maxwell's Equations should not be powerpoint-ified, sorry.
I have very limited teaching experience, but I did find that having a way to project images or videos was very useful. For example, I projected applets which showed how the derivative of a function changes over the x axis. My students learned far more from that than they possibly could have from anything I could have said or written on the subject.
Like with anything, some balance is necessary. I'm sure you're right that images of cell parts, etc are far better projected as an image. But maybe you could try a couple of lessons where you don't use any text at all? For example, you'd physically write out vocab words on the board as they came up on the board. It's possible that even watching someone physically write or spell the word out makes a difference in how the students perceive and remember it.
Then gradually start adding more text to your slides until you find some kind of balance.
In my opinion, trial and error is the only way to figure out what works. You might even try asking the students what they prefer, although I'm not sure how that would work out with your group of students.
Sorry for taking over your blog entry with my own. =)
Well, I have some tough acts to follow, especially Tim's. First off, don't be sorry about the hiatus; I got an oral post about disasters along the way (it was legendary).
ReplyDeleteNest...PowerPoint doesn't suck, it's just that it takes a long time to really make a presentation that works. We've all seen crappy presentations that lack organization, go too fast or too slow, distracting typos, etc. When I've really worked on presentations for conferences and stuff, they're awesome, but that takes weeks of trail and error and what teacher has that kind of time?
Thirdly, my kids sweat powerpoint. Mostly because I'm not getting in the way as they vigorously copy my pages and pages of notes. In reality, I never give more that a page of notes in a single lesson, but the format is good for working in videos, charts, pictures...all sorts of things.
I got sweet new hookups now, so I'm moving on to Activstudio flipcharts. Laters