ETEC 511: ePortfolio

Edaward Tuff is very tough on PowerPoint in his article The cognitive style of PowerPoint: Pitching out corrupts within. As much as PowerPoint has helped teachers organize their lessons, there have been negative side effects for learning that Tuff identifies. He notes that PowerPoint is “presenter-oriented” rather than “audience-oriented”. I also believe that the structure of PowerPont engenders the transmission style of teaching. I suppose the same case could be made for SmartBoards. I really do like SmartBoards and think they can bring a lesson to life but the content is teacher controlled and is designed for allow a one way transmission of information from an authoritative figure.

I begin to disagree with Tuff however when he details the limitations of PowerPoint to present data and statistics in comparisons to a paper handout or technical report. Tuff demonstrates clearly the a technical report or book is able to hold far more data and therefore more accurate information than PowerPoint. While this is certainly true, I think PowerPoints are designed to be used than entirely different way than a report. A technical report is aimed at telling the whole story by itself. PowerPoints are intended to be explained or accompanied by a human expert. The slides usually point people in the right direction, but the details come form the presenter or links on the slides. My take away from this part is that PowerPoints should be used as handout or distributed alone as they are limited in detailing the complete picture (as with what happened with the Columbia space shuttle!).

Image by vissago courtesy Flickr