Week 5 - PowerPoint

PowerPoint and its many uses. 

http://marketing-works.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/logo_powerpoint_2007.jpg

PowerPoint practicals 

The web site linked below has been beneficial in my understanding on how to use PowerPoint in a variety of productive ways. Before the week 5 engagement activities I had just used PowerPoint as an aide for presentations and had not even realised that there are multiple ways to utalise PowerPoint. Instead of just using PowerPoint for the purposes of teacher centered instruction, students can use PowerPoint to enhance their learning using creative methods that are engaging and versatile. Students can create slide shows from photos they have taken while on field trips for to collect in visual form an overview of historic sites and places of interest. For English lessons interactive book reports can be a fascinating look inside the otherwise tedious method of report writing.

http://www.online.tusc.k12.al.us/tutorials/pptclass/pptclass.htm


PowerPoint can also be utalised as a Collaborative learning tool by using mouse-michief
http://www.microsoft.com/multipoint/mouse-mischief/en-us/default.aspx
This whole class interactive tool can benefit younger grades although it could be used in high school I have not seen how this particular tool could benefit outside of an introduction or prior learning technique. Mouse-mischief could be an engagement tool used at the beginning of a lesson to gain the attention of the whole class by using a question and answer multiple choice exercise to discover prior learning or help build from the basics of the content you may be teaching.

I have designed PowerPoint for classes that I have taught but I have never used PowerPoint to create an outline. After using this I have decided that this would be a time saving way of creating PowerPoint's for presentation purposes. Likewise English students creating multimodal assessments will be able to design storyboard PowerPoint's to aide their presentation.


During my experimentation of PowerPoint (which needs a lot more time) I was able to make a moveable PowerPoint here is the link.
http://www.slideshare.net/ShaneDoyle1/presentation4-13820843
I find a lot of these ICT's confusing with linking and creating multiple accounts and needing quite a lot of time to explore and work out how to use a  lot of these electronic tools. I have spent quite a number of hours in reading through the instructions and trying to work out how to use PowerPoint  with quite a lot of frustration because I get so far and cannot work the rest through. I am learning and wish to learn more about ICT's in order to better my classroom lessons though I am fully aware that some of these tools I do not 'get' right away. In saying that, running through these exercises has given me a foundation (after some time of trial and error) on which to build my knowledge in the hope of designing lessons that can incorporate interact PowerPoint lessons that are aimed at student achievement and not at my comfort level as a learning Manager.


Overall my knowledge of PowerPoint has grown exponentially over the last couple of days as I had always seen PowerPoint as a 'boring' tool that only direct teaching can utalise but after investigating PowerPoint further I can safely say that this tool would be a wonderful addition to any collaborative and interactive classroom.  
Shane