Whenever I am going to lecture, someone asks if I plan to use PowerPoint. And I always say “no, I just need a microphone and a glass of water.”
I know that is retrograde, but to date I have found most PowerPoint presentations to be disruptive or simplistic. I hate it when someone puts up a screen and reads what is says, as thought he audience is illiterate. Sometimes the visuals are clever graphics that make you laugh. Sometimes the setup doesn’t work and the presentation is ruined.
I am thinking of using PowerPoint when I talk about my new book because I use a lot of data to say important things. But I will need lessons and help.
This essay on AV was written by Joseph Epstein, a brilliant essayist. Epstein and I worked together at The Néw Leader magazine in the early 1960s. But that’s another story.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Instead of Power Point, try Prezi http://prezi.com. It’s like PP on steroids….a bit of a challenge to learn, but so much more engaging.
I think Prezi is awful. I don’t need to be transported through letters like the astrounaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I agree, prezi s make me nauseous with screen induced motion sickness.
Prezi is free and at least symbolic of a breakaway from the Gates way of doing things.
It can be overdone, but a very cool alternative to consider!
Like when you have to sit though fireworks noises with each new slide or bouncing titles over and over. Prezi can be very well done but historic and primal forms of human communication often make the point very well. Diane I think your microphone and a glass would be wonderful to be listening to.
I find being given lots and lots of tables and date very hard to follow since I do not work with it daily but more on a weekly basis and then I have time to really look over the graphs and charts. Maybe summarize what the chart and graph show and provide your data on here. Folks who want to can look it up, and others may be happy with just the summary for their purposes.
Those who are going to tear into it anyway will pick apart a PowerPoint, Prezi or dog and pony show so stay with what you are comfortable with! If you have someone who knows how your brain works and who can teach you that way; Great! If not, your vast knowledge and experience (that is so well communicated here and in the interviews you do) it will come through and you won’t be trying to use new tools in a rush.
If you’re using a lot of data, it is really useful to have a visual representation. I know I’m someone who absorbs information better with both auditory and visual cues than with just auditory clues alone.The other advantage is you can post the data slides online afterward if you want.
Best advice I ever heard on the usage of powerpoints: Make a no-text rule. Powerpoints are great for photos, charts, graphs, maybe slide titles…. but totally agree that there are few things more boring and simplistic than wordy powerpoints.
I so agree!
I hear ya. I use PP with middle school students for two reasons: To engage my class for at least six minutes and to impress my boss. He likes flashy lights and bouncy texts. That what he shows us at weekly staff meetings.
Don’t you all love it when you have PD on something like differentiating instruction or engaging teaching methods, and all the presenter does is read his/her own power point slides to the audience? Irony, anyone?
When I use it, it is basically as a higher tech replacement for old fashioned slides and slide projectors.
Prezi indeed! Much more dynamic and if you’re not sure of the way you present… It supports your talk ánd you can share it!
The “impress the boss” factor is very real. I was told to prepare a demo lesson before I was hired and was told I should use PP.
I am torn about the effects on the kids. I teach bio and the beautiful graphics certainly can be helpful. However when I was in school, the teacher accomplished the same things with a roll down chart that he brought in for the lesson.
However, I think that along the way, a lesson should prompt the student to generate their own diagrams and charts even if they are “inferior” to the professional drawings on the board. By drawing your own diagram, say about the chambers of the heart, the student is forced to use another skill and I bet we could show that it reinforces the learning more than passively looking at the PP and copying notes. I also think that I and others tend to give too many notes and too broad a topic because of the nature of PP and that as the kids take those notes, the main idea of the lesson winds up only on paper, not in the grey matter. When I draw on the board I am careful to make sure the kids know that I am the worst artist in the room and that they can always do better in their drawings. Sometimes I will have an ELMO set up so the students can see the drawings of anyone willing to share.
Believe me when I write that PP presentations are not that effective when students do not create them. Sure, the cool features and dramatic sounds get students to pay attention, and even learn a little. But once I create unit lessons allowing students to present PPs, that’s when real learning begins. Students self-correct their writing, pay close attention to detail (okay, some do) and learn more about the subject than from a lecture. Go figure?
I loathe Power Pointlessness and you certainly don’t need it for anything. But I admit it can be helpful in making statistical references memorable via colorful bar and pie graphs and whatnot. Consider making whatever slides you use available online so people, having seen you speak, can look them up and reference them for further dissemination.
When kids presented their learning using power points, we talked about using just main words and then telling the rest and it’s exactly to what you say. Too many words distract and take away.
And believe it or not, great way to push main idea. One or two words and then talk to that is what we would always do. And images of course.
I agree with it being a useful tool if visuals are needed. And the more INTERACTIVE it can be, the more engaging. In the classroom, it’s helpful to project modeled assignments on a white board that students can come up and write on as a guided instructional activity. But if it’s used with a lot of words, it becomes meaningless. I’ve seen a number of your talks/debates on youtube Diane. PowerPoint could help if you have anything visual to add; however, having seen/heard your talks, your words are certainly powerful enough. Now… that being said, if you’re trying to present some data of your own, perhaps it will help. If I were there, I’d walk you through it 🙂 . Once you get the hang of it, it can be pretty nifty.
One advantage of power point is that if they lied you have the positive verification of such. I just busted last year the California State Board of Education on two power points in one session. One was on special education and the other was on charter schools. By the next day they were busted and they went crazy. If you know your subject you should not need power point. When I go out and talk with people and need to explain difficult subjects I always bring my computer with all the information in it and the spreadsheets. With these tools people more easily understand complicated subjects like school funding and API scores through time as they are lined up in excell spreadsheets and are very easy to comprehend when explained. In fact, those in the inner city get them faster than the wealthier so called educated people. Just because they do not have an education does not mean they are not smart. People generally explode when showed what I have with documented facts and that is not so easy by just speaking. In fact, in this type of situation the only thing that really works is the combination of the spreadsheets and documentation along with speaking to the points and answering questions. The combination for what I do is the best and that will not always be the case as when testifying or speaking in public it must almost always be spoken and that is another forum to deal with and another skill.
I think I found this on Diane Senechal’s site.
I made the following into a poster and posted it outside of my classroom:
PowerPoint is both a ubiquitous tool and a powerful medium, but it tends to promote usage of an impoverished, standardized, and depersonalized language. The use of graphs and images is random and often useless, if not deceptive.
In twenty years, the program has also become the favored medium for a certain ideology, which prefers efficient action to reflection, rationalization to reason, and computer modeling to inspiration. This ideology, which the sociologist Vincent de Gaulejac calls “managerial” (gestionnaire), has become a system of thought with procedures and styles of representation that imbue many sectors of activity.
It is especially brains that have to be protected from contamination, because the “grammar” of PowerPoint, in a kind of boomerang effect, has begun to infiltrate the very domains from which it drew inspiration, as though the pupil has surpassed the master.
Although it may not make us stupid, there is no doubt that PowerPoint, like many other media, helps to make the world illiterate and contributes to the abandonment of critical thinking, to blind acceptance, to a new form of voluntary servitude.
It is as though, subjected to the battering of the contemporary model of society, everyone had been forced, out of a concern for efficiency and in conformity to the dominant role of thinking, to abandon any capacity to reason and criticize; as though, after all we could persuade with five slogans and two pictures – as though we had all become children again.
From
How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid: The Faulty Causality, Sloppy Logic, Decontextualized Data, and Seductive Showmanship That Have Taken Over Our Thinking by Franck Frommer
Thank you so much for this post. I see the “managerial” mind in so many of my teacher colleagues. It disgusts me. They hate debate, discussion, rumination. All they want is their marching orders.
Excellent commentary! Thanks!
Power point = Texting = Twittering = Impoverished language
How’s that for a power point presentation (a PPP) slide???
This is the best Power Point presentation of a Power Point presentation. This is a must see.
If you haven’t watched this, do so now.
Too Funny!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Your instincts are right, Diane. Many believe that PowerPoint often undermines effective communication. The case of the 2003 space shuttle disaster has been examined as an striking example. The engineers thought their presentation was providing a clear warning to managers. However, because of PowerPoint’s tendency to encourage over-simplified and hierarchical bullet points, this warning was obscured and lost. Here’s the details;
http://www.thoughtgadgets.com/2012/03/powerpoint-slide-that-brought-down.html
I am sure my comment will speak for many a teacher forced to endure a professional development where we learn about various topics like how child engagement is essential to learning… yet all-the-while- the presenter is reading from his/her powerpoint. And I am thinking, why can’t this presenter just email this to me so I can read it myself at home? And then I realize that if I were at home and started to read this presentation, I would be intelligent and turn off my computer or simply take a nap because it is so life-less and boring and teaches me nothing! I admit that I use powerpoint in my classes but for one purpose only.. to show students quickly the work of various artists because their work connects to what they are about to do. I do not have large passages of writing which I read to them. At most I have a name of the artist with birth date and place of birth and maybe the movement they belong/ or belonged to. It is nothing more than a tool to spark engagement. Sometimes I cannot even use “the powerpoint”. Why? Because when the LCD bulb starts to go it turns everything a hideous green hue and I prefer for the students to see a more authentic version of the artwork. Or sometimes the technology is not up to snuff and the clarity is poor. And, how often are we able to get new bulbs… NOT VERY because they are costly! I don’t rely on this technology. Oh yes.. also, I went to a National Board Certification introduction and the presenter read THE MOST BORING PRESENTATION FROM HER POWER POINT. If National Board is the gold standard for educations… this gave me huge doubts to go it!
PowerPoint is a tool… neither good, nor bad… it’s all in how it’s used.
PowerPoint is most powerful when it’s used to display data: charts, graphs, etc. If you recall, your readers were even asking for visuals when you posted Uri Treisman’s speech. https://dianeravitch.net/2013/05/21/uri-treismans-powerful-speech-on-equity-to-nctm/
People who are gifted with the written and spoken word probably do find less value in PowerPoint, but some members of the audience will find visual reinforcement to be helpful. But simply putting words on a screen is not using visual aids to their best effect. I recommend the works of Edward Tufte on visual communication. We can take in far more information visually than we can through speech. If you are speaking about trends in education, you might only be able to highlight the trend and a few data points. If you show a chart, you can show all the detail for your audience as proof you are not cherry-picking. Just because you want to include two or three charts doesn’t mean that you need to reproduce your entire talk on screen. You can start and end with all black slides. (You can also pause in your speech to give the audience time to take in a detailed chart.) PowerPoint is also helpful for giving out web site addresses and mundane details like that which are awkward to say out loud. If this is all new to you, seek out advice from people who are as skilled with visual communication as you are with writing and speaking.
Some advice …
1) Power Point is ok if necessary BUT – do not leave the slide / screen on when you don’t need it. Audience will keep looking at slide and not hear anything you continue to say. Hit shift-w or shift-b to white or darken screen, then “esc” when you need it back
2) Prezis are good IF you really know it. Otherwise audience can get dizzy and distracted from your words
3) Use a FLIP CHART (old school) for effect! Nothing more powerful than the anticipation of “What’s she writing” and watching it unfold. And, you can use some dramatic effects. Such as – They say charters are superior to the other schools in the city. Then list: attendance, behavior, achievement, regents exams passed, college admissions, ELL improvement, special education enrollment. Then put a check mark by the first, a check by the second, then a big strike through line on the others as you say “No” to each of them.
4) If you use a power point, slip in picture or an icon they’ll remember. Ex: They say “Charters are superior to other schools in the city on all measures” – “Yeh, and we all remember this statement, too” And show “Dewey Defeats Truman” picture.
contexts:
historical
These are all excellent points! Go for it Diane! I like powerful photos or statistics thrown in randomly throughout a slide show also!! Keeps everyone alert! There are studies that show people do best with input being visual, auditory, tactile and maybe even you can bring in some aromatherapy to really make your points stick!
I agree: most Power Point presentations I’ve seen, including those at professional conferences, have been bad. It’s possible to do a good one, if the content you have in mind fits the form constraints of Power Point. I know. I made one summarizing the data of a quantitative study I’d done, and was able to include a number of graphs to make the numbers easier to understand.
Once at a conference, I saw a Power Point presentation that was part of a panel made up of graduate students of a prominent scholar in the field. One student was in change of changing the slides while another one talked. The slides got out of sync so what we were seeing was not what the speaker was saying. In a goofy kind of way it made the presentation more interesting; the Power Point visuals ended up being sort of like the zipper at the bottom of the screen on TV news broadcasts. Better than a verbatim transcript of the speaker’s remarks at any event!
I heard you speak in Chicago a few years back, Diane, before your last book came out.
In your talk you synthesized and clarified the privatizer’s rhetoric which I had been struggling to make sense of. It really was as though the ‘scales fell from my eyes.’
And I wasn’t the only one who felt similarly. It was standing room only. I had hoped to hear you again at Lane Tech, but that wasn’t to be unfortunately.
I agree that the audience pays a lot of attention to anticipating what the speaker will write down.
I saw this used very well with an overhead projector and transparencies, with pens of different colors. Writing the numbers down that you want folks to take away with them might actually be very effective.
I find that powerpoints that are just graphic images with little to no text help emphasis but I really hate reading graphs from powerpoints, I much prefer to have graphs and data on paper so that I can refer to them while the speaker is talking. A slide goes past faster than a potential question can crop up.
I have found that pecha kucha style powerpoints hammer home a point if organized well. Might not be your style.
All one needs to know about PowerPoint is covered in the biography of Steve Jobs. If anyone dared to do a presentation using that, s/he was told to sit down! Jobs believed that anyone should be able to present without PowerPoint. Speak to the point(s) and if necessary use a marker/chalk on a board.
Whenever my students did PP presentations they reminded me of the old slides that were used back in the day. I was not a fan!
Of course today too many teachers feel that they can’t teach/present a lesson without a computer/projector/whiteboard. Get over it..if you can teach you don’t need all of that technology to present a lesson. At times they do add to information presented, but no one who’s a real teacher needs them each and every day. Sorry to say, I’ve seen too much of depending on “technology”, instead of working up a good lesson/presentation.
I so admire Steve Jobs.
I too get infuriated when a presenter puts text on a power point and
reads it as if implying the audience is illiterate.
The audience be they adults or children will bore quite easily unless the material is visually appealing and of substance.
Also Document camera for graphics can be presented like an overhead projector.
Amen. See Edward Tufte’s great essay “The Cognitivie Style of Powerpoint.”
“The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
Thanks. For those who didn’t follow the link…
If only they had Power Point: What Communists would have thought at the 1956 Budapest military parade in Stalin Square (archival photo with added text bubbles):
– An integrated application solution for show trials!
– There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list!
– For Re-education campaigns, nothing is better than the auto-content wizard!
But even better…
Whenever I used slide shows, I include a summary of what I want to say at that time, or maybe citations for what I’m saying on the screen. So the slides are like note cards for myself that lead to an extemporaneous performance. What you don’t want is for the slideshow itself to be your canned presentation. But if you wanted to distribute your presentation in words, you could just publish it, like a book.
I agree that reading a long text in front of a class is boring.If you are using a lot of visuals and make it interactive, it can be a good complement to a textbook. In the public schools we are only given an outdated set of ripped, dog-eared books. If you want to introduce a different perspective, more varied examples or different visuals, it can add something to a class. As with anything, it becomes boring to do the same thing every day. A power point can allow a teacher to use more up-to date photographs and examples
that are more relevant than those in a ten year old textbook. Also, I work in an old school with worn out chalkboards, and projecting something on a power point can be easier for the students to read. I try to use bright colors and large visuals to complement a concept.
You have textbooks????
The kids around here buy the 10 year old textbooks from ebay!
Give everyone a white board and a colored marker…you can buy one sheet at a hardware store and cut them up.
The tutorees love it…They write…solve…write…draw…doodle…learn…easy to see mistakes…before transferring to paper…
“But I will need lessons and help.”
I agree with many posters on this thread…PPT can be silly, distracting, and a waste of time.
However, it can be helpful to get across certain concepts. In my experience as a science teacher,things very abstract ( the electron transport chain…location, functions of carrier molecules, for example) and also numbers (seeing trends, comparing numbers, graphing, etc. ) do well with slides.
Also, slides can be referred to later by the audience.
Could be useful when trying to do battle with the “billionaire boys club” and the infinite media/ advertising budget they control.
I have a lot of experience with PPT,
If I could be of any assistance, it would be my pleasure.
(don’t worry..I don’t use gif images..a little teacher humor there)
My one piece of advice: if at all possible, do a test run before you present to make sure that everything is working properly. The only thing worse than watching someone read to you what’s written on the screen is watching someone fiddle with the tech for 15 mins before they read to you what’s written on the screen.