Week Five: PowerPoint

I was really impressed with how I could teach using PowerPoint. I discussed with my cohort group in class how to use PowerPoint to teach English lessons. I was really surprised with some of the suggestions I received, such as using it to show family trees. I can see how that would be useful, particularly in teaching Romeo and Juliet. It would be a good visual representation on how all the characters were related to the Capulets or the Montagues.

PowerPoint is also a good way to reach visual learners because they can see the data with pictures and diagrams to support the material. The PowerPoint lesson would address spatial intelligence, linguistic intelligence, and possibly musical intelligence if music or songs related to the material were presented in the PowerPoint as well.

As a future teacher, I believe PowerPoint will not only address the aforementioned multiple intelligences, it will also serve as a great tool in organizing and synthesizing lesson plans and also in developing and sharing curriculum with other educators. I thought sharing our PowerPoint lesson plans this week with our fellow classmates was a great way to see how other educators were utilizing PowerPoint to develop engaging lesson plans. It is also a good format to share information in that it is user-friendly and engaging. One downside is that the PowerPoint files can be too large to send easily as e-mail attachments.

For students, I feel PowerPoint will help make lessons more engaging and may be a really useful tool if they could be posted on a school website. The slides could be printed and used as notes or to catch up on missed work if the student was absent the day the material was presented. PowerPoint presentations would also be good study materials to review for an exam.

There are many ways PowerPoint can be used successfully in education, and I look forward to learning more about its uses and implication in the classroom.