PowerPoint

Hi there, I just finished looking at the tutorial on PowerPoint (PP). A bit old eh? I did not learn that version of PP. I found a better tutorial on YouTube. It was called PowerPoint 2007 Demo: Create a basic presentation quickly by DemoTrainer (2008). I started teaching myself last year with the 2007 version on office and I found it easy to navigate and I was just a novice!! I think it was easy for me because of the format of the program. By having tabulations with main topics it made it simple to find what I wanted to do. My only main challenges I have found with PP is getting objects to zoom in across the screen one by one as I have seen on other PP. I am interested to learn how to do this but with universtiy assignments ever present I believe I do not have the time to learn this yet. Maybe over my holidays!!! Over my time at university I have been using PP for group presentations and for lesson at school. My first experience was doing a survey of people on why they wanted to become a teacher? This presentation went successfully due to the features of adding graphs, charts, images and video (hyperlinked) into the presentation. I have also used it last year for my lessons in class. One such lesson I used it on was for multiplication for a group of year 4 students. I had a series of slides that had algorithms and arrays on them. I would proceed to display the slide through a projector onto the whiteboard via a laptop. I would begin by braking down the sum by showing it in an array form. I would ask the students to come up and circle on the whiteboard the amounts we were after to solve the algorithm. The students found this engaging and enjoyed doing this. By using this form of technology it catered for the visual and kinesthetic learners. From a teachers point of view it saves on drawing heaps of dots on the board. It could be easily modified and stored for future use - which was for my case. I also used it to do co-ordination and mapping. For example I would display a map of the classroom in a grid projected onto the whiteboard. On the 'Y' axis I would have letters. On the 'X' axis I would have numbers. I talk about how co-ordination would work and show the students by doing an example on the projection. I would then let the students try it for themselves. Once againg this was a good base for a template and could be easily modified for different activies. As stated in PowerPoint in the classroom,(2009) "PowerPoint is a wonderful tool for learning in both a student and teacher-directed situation. It can add a new dimension to learning allowing teachers to explain abstract concepts, while accommodating all learning styles". Picture - Co-ordination, C/O Philip Gray, 2008