Beyond PowerPoint

This is the first in a short series on using tech tools for Science classes. None of the ideas are ground-breaking innovations but I did find that they provided significant benefits for learning. While these ideas were used for Science classes, they could be applied to other subject areas.

Outside of the Science lab, I had used PowerPoint for many years, so when I eventually obtained a permanently installed data projector on my room, I decided to use PowerPoint whenever I was presenting new work. When I started doing this, I often became frustrated when students showed that their priority was to copy down every word on the screen rather than participating in the discussion and getting to understand the concepts. In attempt to change their priority I would tell them they could easily download the PowerPoint at home but it is not easy to participate in the discussion at home.

When it came to revision time, I decided to add narration to my PowerPoint documents to give a summary of what we had discussed in class add the comments that I typically did in class. The positive feedback from students encouraged me to do this for each topic. They never commented in the quality of my microphone even though the recordings had background noises.

Benefits

The main benefit I found was that using these narrations in PowerPoint enabled me to shift some activities to out-of-class work, providing more time in class for discussion and individual help. Of course, there are many other ways that you could use PowerPoint with narration. I have had students use this method to prepare assignments as an alternative to written work or oral presentations.

How-To

Recording narration in PowerPoint is quite efficient. If you stumble on words and wish to repeat, you can repeat the recording for individual slides. There are many web videos that provide instructions for recording narration in PowerPoint. Here is one from YouTube.



When you have the recording you can upload it your schools learning management system, but I found that AuthorStream provides a very good alternative, that is totally free. You can link to the Authorstream page or better still, you can embed the presentation on a web page, as shown in the sample below.

Reaction Rates Revision

More PowerPoint presentations from PeterWallace

This make it look like an image on your web page and gives you the option of writing comments such as instructions or questions. It also helps to keep your students on your page.

If you are not familiar with the procedure for embedding video, here is a YouTube video that explains how to embed a YouTube video into a blog.




Embedding from Authorstream is very similar but the embed button is on the right. The embed text is HTML code and some systems can automatically recognise it as HTML. In other cases, you need to switch to HTML edit mode and paste the code there.