The word itself makes me shudder…Powerpoint.

“The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

I will say that every time one of my professors asks me to do a power point presentation the first thing I think is “oh great, a bunch of tedious fact finding and color coordination”. As Tufte has said in this article, power point does make it very difficult to display any detailed information. It more focuses on how to present information as simply as possible. After a few titles and bullet points of simple facts, I find that most of the time I spend on power points is trying to decide which slide should be which colors. Or I spend ten minutes looking up facts for a slide and thirty minutes trying to figure out how to fit a picture in between the bullet points.

I know it seems like a good way to teach kids how to use technology within their learning, but children end up staring at the power point the entire time and reading off of it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through out school its how to give a presentation. You need to be able to talk about the information without just reading it off some screen. This is no way for anybody to learn, and not nearly as much work as teachers seem to think it is.

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