Death by PowerPoint
Flashback, to Christmas 1976.....there's a picture of me in my pj's Christmas morning standing in front of my favorite gift that year.....a chalkboard. It was green with the alphabet across the top and even had a chalk tray at the bottom. I spent hours, chalk in hand, showing my three year old sister how to spell "cafeteria" and drawing the layout of a softball field, carefully circling right field to indicate where I picked flowers every Saturday afternoon. It was so good to get my thoughts out for the world to see!
Fast forward to 2002 when I first experienced a presentation done in PowerPoint. The heavens opened as the glossy fonts descended with animated graphics skipping into and out of the screen on a single click. It was this teacher's dream come true. Now I could take those yellowed transparencies and type them into colorful slides so that all of my children could finally learn. Surely it would improve the test scores....I mean, I even had music. I spent countless hours pouring over each lesson presentation, making sure each slide had just the right pizzazz and the downloaded pictures stolen from the internet, were tilted at just the right angle to signal to the audience that their presenter was quirky but cool.
Test scores did not soar and retention rates did not improve despite my creative efforts. What on earth went wrong? I didn't know, what I didn't know.... Presentations in slide form were not magical. They were actually obstacles to the learning.
Steve Jobs poo pooed Powerpoint on the regular. He once said that, "People who know what they are talking about, don't need PowerPoint". He further explained that it blocks discussion and prevents an even flow of ideas from not only the presenter, but the audience. (Side note: Powerpoint was actually created solely for Macintosh computers in the 1980's.). Other tech royalty have pitched in on the effectiveness of presentations from Powerpoint to Keynote. Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn), view it as an impediment to the builder mentality.
It's not just corporate gods who have weighed in on the shortfalls of presentations, Marine General James N. Mattis stated that "PowerPoint makes us stupid", and after a botched bombing mission in Kosovo, General Stanley McChrystal, called PowerPoint the principal enemy of the United States Army. Brings new meaning to the phrase, "death by powerpoint", huh?
What evil lurks behind this tech that so many leaders of the free world are quick to criticize?
In the classroom, I used it. Too much. There I said it. How else was I going to "cover" ALL of the information I had to "cover" before my kids took the test? Besides, it was fun. A performance, really! MY performance......I still go back and look at my old presentations with a proud smile on my face. It was so good to get my thoughts out for the world to see.....
My thoughts, my thinking, my performance.....did you get that? The presentations really just became a fancy vehicle for content and my own learning. The students in my class just became passive note takers as they enjoyed the show. Entertaining? Sure! Best use of technology in the classroom? Nope.
I get it. Especially with teachers new to the profession and/or content. It's nice to have those district "bundles" all tied up in a bow for each unit. I used to appreciate it too as an administrator at the secondary level. These days it's difficult to find teachers with a certification and even harder to find those with the content expertise needed. It was great to give them the link to the district materials and send them off, promising to find time to coach their deficiency in classroom management. But it became apparent that, standard scripts on a slide, that may or may not be read verbatim, only stand in the way of the audience staying engaged and more importantly learning the content.
Here's why. Presentations tend to reveal content in a linear fashion that more times than not exclude the audience in the thinking. Students miss out on the discourse and interaction that strengthens retention in the meandering and path a learner and a teacher take to get to a solution or an answer. You are really better off with an overhead projector and a yellowed transparency, drawing figures and connecting the dots as each new piece of content emerges. Gotta admit I kind of miss the Vis-a-Vis marker on the outer edges of my palm and fingertips.... yes I licked and wiped.