Teacher Paul
Teaching, Living and Learning in Singapore
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Feb 20 2015

5- Shades of PowerPoint

When I was teaching back in Indiana, I used PowerPoint fairly regularly to present content to my students. It served as a record of what I had taught, so I could use it the next year; it allowed students who were absent to catch up on some of the material that they had missed; it helped students know what they were supposed to take notes on in class.

Since I’ve been in Hanoi, I’ve been able to take a step back and reflect a bit on all those PowerPoints, somewhat to my chagrin. As I sit in the theater with the other teachers and we watch a presentation from Operations, or Finance, or the Board of Directors, I remember what it’s like to see people reading off of PowerPoint slides.

Although there are many different metaphors that I find helpful when I think about teaching, one of them is performance art.  It is a type of performance that should be more interactive than a movie or a theater performance, but perhaps less than a massive game of soccer. If teaching is a performance, then what is the metaphorical equivalent of reading text off of PowerPoint slides? Would that be akin to watching actors play out a scene before they are off-script?

Last November I read How to Deliver a TED Talk: Secrets of the World’s Most Inspiring Presentations, by Jeremy Donovan.  Donovan has spent years studying what makes for an effective presentation, and is also one of the most avidly anti-PowerPoint presentation writers I’ve seen.  In his mind, the majority of slides in presentations do the opposite of what was intended: rather than enhancing the presentation they distract from it.

Donovan points out that the most popular TED talk as of yet, Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity”, does not use any slides or images at all.  Robinson is not the only one who has found power in stripping his presentation down to the bare essentials; another great example is Angela Lee Duckworth’s “The Key to Success: Grit”.

And yet, neither life nor teaching is a TED talk.  Crafting a strong, clear message can not take a cookie-cutter approach, and different presentations require different elements. With that said, here are some thoughts about a few different presentation styles and what strengths each bring to the table.

StyleDescriptionProsCons
All TalkThis is the style described above, as used by Ken Robinson and Angela Lee Duckworth in their TED talks. Focus on presenter
Great for storytelling
Zero distractions
Requires strong speaking
Audience may forget points
Words can be inadequate
Difficult for dry subjects
Relies on speaker credibility
Difficult to take notes
Pictures onlyThis style is actually fairly uncommon, and consists of a slide show with all photos and no text.Fosters careful observation
Photos can add credibility
Can compliment narrative
Shows rather than tells
Illustrates examples
Shows other perspectives
Requires strong speaking, off-script
Requires outstanding photos
Can take attention off speaker
Difficult to convey complexity with no narration
Difficult for audience to take notes
Hard to show non-visual topics
Looks bad with stock photos
Pictures and Word FragmentsElegant style, relying mostly on pictures with some supporting text. Examples include ISB’s brochure and Daniel Pink’s TED talk “The Puzzle of Motivation”All of the Pros above, plus:

Simple words can express abstract ideas
Conceptual anchors for interpreting photos
All of the Cons above, EXCEPT:

Hard to show non-visual topics
Looks bad with stock photos
Pictures and Bullet pointsThis is one of most common styles of presentations; typically has text on one side and a picture on the other, or alternates text slides with pictures. An example is Gary Stager’s TEDx talk on Seymour Papert.Easy for speaker to focus on talking points
Can be easily converted into notes
Caters to audience that prefers to read instead of listen
Redundant - audience reading & being read to
Focus is on the details, not the big picture
Attention divided between reading and listening
Often slides have too much text

Mostly or all textThe most classic example of this is reading a book out loud (perhaps showing pictures). This can also be found in comically bad PowerPoints, such as Peter Norvig’s PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg AddressFor book reading:

Makes reading more social
Presenter can practice reading out-loud
Allows a story to be acted as well as read

For PowerPoint: none
For book reading:

Does not require reader to internalize the story
Usually only the reader is engaging in the story

For PowerPoint: everything

By pswanson • Blog • 1

Jan 18 2015

Media literacy

We’ve all been there: sitting in a theater or auditorium with dozens of other teachers, learning about how to create dynamic, exciting lessons and curriculum for our students, viewing one horribly designed PowerPoint slide after another.

It ranks up there with another frustration of mine: when presenters use outdated, inappropriate pedagogy to deliver a talk about innovative pedagogy.

Why is it that intelligent, professional educator who are charged with teaching students how to design presentations, websites, and discussions have such a difficult time modeling that same behaviour? Why do people who teach design often fail at utilizing these same principles?

I think about what George Lucas said about visual and film literacy in an interview with Edutopia, and I’m struck by a number of thoughts:

  • Lucas is absolutely correct when he says “Today we work with the written or spoken word as the primary form of communication. But we also need to understand the importance of graphics, music, and cinema, which are just as powerful and in some ways more deeply intertwined with young people’s culture.”
  • For the past 50 years, schools have stressed linguistic and mathematical literacies, but most teachers have had little practice in artistic or aesthetic literacy. We’re not great at it.
  • It is a bit ironic that Lucas is criticizing teachers for our struggle to practice the types of innovative practices and pedagogies for which we often advocate. Lucas has had similar struggles (and failures) himself with practicing what he preaches. Case in point: his comment in From ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Jedi’ that “A Special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”

By and large, it seems that media literacy has two broad components:

  1. Learning how to design and create aesthetically beautiful images, presentations, movies, music, and other media
  2. Learning to interrogate media in the same way that literary critics interrogate texts: to examine the assumptions, biases, agendas, and implications of all types of media.

The first of these areas seems like a fertile area for interdisciplinary studies. After all, understanding how visual art, music, theater, dance, and design affect people and emotions is an integral part of those subjects. It also crosses over into literature, history, psychology, science, and sociology.

As for the interrogation of media, it’s interesting to me how comedy and satire are actually leading the way with this global discourse.  Take, for example, how The Daily Show with Jon Stewart regularly lampoons the absurdities of the 24 hour news cycle and Fox News. Or look at South Park’s responses to the Danish cartoon controversy, or their critique of how photoshopping images can have devastating impacts on the self-images of girls.

Various writers have characterized young people today as cynical and disillusioned. I would argue that at least part of this characterization comes from an increasing sophistication to the types of psychological manipulations coming from commercials, newscasts, etc.  Many kids have a finely tuned bullshit radar, and all too often their suspicions about hidden agendas and ulterior motives are born out.

On the other hand, sometimes these sorts of satirical critiques backfire when kids have not yet gained the necessary level of media sophistication. Back in 2005 I was working as a dorm supervisor at Woodstock school in India. I was in charge of 27 ninth grade boys, and one weekend while I was off-duty my mother, who was covering for me, walked in on one of my boys watching the Sasha Baron Cohen film Borat. My mom had no idea what the film was about but suspected that it might be some sort of gay porn, so she confiscated the DVD and told them that I would deal with it when I got back.

When I returned I was faced with a conundrum. I was a personal fan of the Borat film because I thought it did an amazing job of exposing the cultural ignorance and prejudices of Americans, but I wasn’t sure that my Indian boys saw it the same way. I told the kids that I would give them back their movie if they could explain to me why it was funny. One of them answered (not making this up) that it was funny because Borat was making fun of Jewish people.  I was a bit horrified, and told them that Sasha Baron Cohen would not want them to be watching the film. Their response: “Who is Sasha Baron Cohen?”

By pswanson • Blog • 3

Dec 23 2014

SAMR and Stager

I met Dr. Gary Stager last spring at the ASB Unplugged event in Mumbai, and had a great time at the Maker Space workshop with his partner, Dr. Sylvia Martinez.  Afterwards, I bought their book, Invent to Learn, and found many of their ideas fascinating. I was a big fan of John Dewey when I was studying education, and I loved the way those ideas were brought into the 21st century by Seymour Papert. Here is the video of Stager’s TEDx talk at ASB Unplugged. Not the best slideshow (as Stager himself said), but it was good to learn more about Papert.

Fast forward to last week, when I had the opportunity to see Dr. Ruben Puentedura, the founder of SAMR, discuss his tech-integration model in a Preconference at 21st Century Learning. Here is an example of one of his explanations of SAMR:

I wrote about my own thoughts on the SAMR model, posted it on Twitter, and was pleasantly surprised to see a few dozen people found it helpful. Then Stephen Hasketh @sdhesketh tweeted my post to Dr. Stager. It turns out that Dr. Stager is not a fan of SAMR. You can read the Twitter conversation below for yourself. Today has definitely been one of the strangest Twitter days of my life. How did I end up in an argument with Dr. Stager?

By pswanson • Blog • 0

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