back

Thoughts on Technology

In all of my classes, students made significant use of computers. Most of this use was based around word processing and typing, although students also made heavy use of the internet as a reserach resource and programs such as Excel and PowerPoint. I did not make use of any special science software programs during my time at Friends Select, although I could have imagined incorporating programs such as A.D.A.M. into a future curriculum. In both the upper and middle schools, I regularly took my students to the computer room, in which there was work space for each student to have their computer. I quickly realized that there was a range in terms of how comfortable students were with using the computers, but that most students were quite comfortable and some students knew more than I did. I noticed that the computer room was often reserved by other teachers from all disciplines, so students grew accustomed to using software and technology for a variety of different purposes.

Marine Biology and PowerPoint

click here to view the lesson plan

In designing this lesson, my cooperating teacher and I decided that one of our goals was for the students in the marine biology class to learn how to use PowerPoint if they did not know how to use it already. All of the students were going to be doing original research later in the semester and would need to make a PowerPoint presentation of their projects to the school community at the school's Math and Science Symposium. We thought that during this project, we would be able to provide them with more support and guideance in learning how to use the program effectively than they would receive later in the semester.

There were several strengths in the design of incorporating PowerPoint into the project:

• Students did learn how to use the program and became significantly more comfortable with it over just a couple weeks of use.
• The use of PowerPoint provided an alternative format in which to do a presenation. It was especially helpful for those students who became nervous or flustered when giving an oral presentation since it provided a clear format to refer to.
• The PowerPoint slide provided a structured and useful guiding format for students to follow when organizing their information.
• The students who already knew how to use PowerPoint were able to assume a teaching/leadership role by teaching others in their groups how to use the program.
• The PowerPoint format also provided an opportunity for some students in the class who were low-achievers on tests and in giving oral presentations to shine in creating the design and layout of the slide show.
• At the end, the students were proud of the profressional and creative nature of their presentations.
• Using PowerPoint increased the consistancy between presentations and made it easier to follow along than simiply listening to lecture combined with overheads and drawing on the board.

Howerver, there were also some problems that arrose from using PowerPoint as a presentation format:

• Students were limited in how creative they could get with the presentation since they only had 20-30 minutes to present and were required to give a full-length PowerPoint presentaion.
• Some students had more technical difficulties with the program. Solving these difficulties consumed their time, resulting in a less attractive and well-thought-out presentation.
• When evaluating the presentations, it was diffiuclt to take into account the fact that many of the students were using PowerPoint for the first time. It was tempting to give a high grade to those students who had strong PowerPont slide shows, even if I knew that groups who put together the weaker shows had struggled with learning the program, yet still worked hard, or even harder than the other groups.
• It was sometimes difficult to distingush between groups whose PowerPoint show was weak because they had not put in effort and groups how had worked hard, but had difficulties with the program.
• Although many of the presenations were attractive, it was difficult to get students to think about the most effective way of using PowerPoint as a presentation tool. For example, groups often wrote large blocks of text on their slides, which made it difficult for the audience to read and also made it difficult for the presenters to speak without reading directly from the slide.