Response - Power Point Articles.

The article called "PowerPoint is Evil" was a breath of fresh air. I had an experience this year as a teacher that was pretty disappointing involoving PowerPoint. I assigned a creative project on Roman history, encouraging students to think outside the box for their presentations. Instead of skits, video, or art work, I got six stale PowerPoint slide shows. To make matters worse, the students took turns reading each slide verbatim. It was boring and I got the idea that many students were uninformed about their own topics. I also felt that amongst the random facts that the students put on the slide there was little glue or context or narrative in their presentations.

The article argues that PowerPoint is evil because it is turning students into sales people in the classroom: using bullett points instead of full sentences, and colorful graphs with less information than flare. Often the slides are data-starved. PowerPoint is good for basic company slide shows with solid data in them. However, it has become to ubiquitous for our own good.