CIT 2007 - WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

TUESDAY, MAY 29, 2007

Getting More Out of PowerPoint in the College Classroom, Part II:
PowerPoint Beyond the Bullets

Instructor: Judith Gustafson
Coordinator of Instructional Technology
Adirondack Community College

Time: 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: Feinberg Library 108
Rating: Intermediate
Platform: PC
Cost: $40

Description:

While the buzz on the blogs is all about Web 2.0, wikis, podcasting, virtual realities, social networking, and the latest hot applications, PowerPoint is still the first tool most instructors turn to when they begin teaching with technology in the classroom and PowerPoint is all the< instructional technology many of them will every need or want. The popularity of PowerPoint in the classroom is understandable: PowerPoint has the virtue of being pretty easy to learn, it is a useful tool for organizing ideas and helping both instructor and students stay on point, and its multimedia capabilities provide a convenient single platform for collecting diverse images, sounds, and movies for show and tells that appeal to a variety of learning styles. Yet we have all seen the negative side of PowerPoint lectures: a single slide that appears to display the complete contents of War and Peace, slide transitions that induce vertigo, bullets that fly in from every which way with annoying pings and whooshes, and presenters who read every word of every slide.

Part II: PowerPoint Beyond the Bullets throws out the lecture format entirely and, instead, explores ways to use PowerPoint as a tool for active learning and student-centered learning. PowerPoint offers interactive hypermedia features that are ideal for playing games and building self-paced reviews and explorations. Participants will begin by adding their own materials to ready-made templates for Jeopardy-like and multiple choice reviews. (Move up a couple of levels in Bloom s taxonomy and turn this activity into student-centered learning by handing over the templates to small groups of students so they can build their own lesson reviews!) They will also learn how to make flash cards with images and sounds as well as explorations with hyperlinks that invite students to look around as their interest takes them, much as they do on the Web.

Upon completion of this workshop, participants should be able to:

• insert images and sound files on a PowerPoint slide
• use the Drawing toolbar to create simple buttons and graphics
• use Action Settings and Custom Animation to create interactive objects
• add Hyperlinks to navigate to other slides
• explore PowerPoint multimedia / hypermedia features for active learning.

Participants should have at least beginning level skills using PowerPoint. Prior to the workshop participants should prepare a Word file containing their own Jeopardy-like review with five categories and 25 answers and questions.