About Presentation Software

Microsoft Powerpoint is my personal favorite presentation software. It makes information look so professional and organized and is extremetly easy to use. It is great to present notes with Powerpoint...they can be made more interesting by using the different tools to enhance the presentation. Here is a great website about Powerpoint in the classroom: http://www.actden.com/pp/ posted by : Courtney B.

Powerpoint presentations are a great way for students to build their confidence in public speaking. A powerpoint presentation is a great tool for students because it helps guide the presenter, as well as the class during a presentation. You can go to this website to get some creative ideas for students, with lesson plans, powerpoint templates and more! http://teach.fcps.net/trt10/PowerPoint.htm Posted by: Dayna Baer

I didn't use powerpoint much in high school, but I used it a lot during college and loved it. I really wish it would have been utilized more when I was in high school because my presentations would have been much more organized. Powerpoint is very useful because you able to highlight the main points and guides you through the presntation. Here is a helpful website I found that will gives you tutorials of powerpoint and really is useful if you have any questions about the software. It is http://electricteacher.com/tutorial3.htm. posted by: Kim Zachar

Presentation software often ruins what would otherwise have been an interesting presentation. People often read mind-numbing bullet points from slides, rather than engaging the audience with well-crafted speech and extemporaneous comments. Many "PowerPoint" sessions have no power, and miss the point. posted by: Trey Martindale

I do agree that presentation software often results in an unappealing and boring presentation; however, I think that any sort of presentation can be "mind-numbing." The person presenting makes or breaks the presentation. posted by: Dayna Baer

I assigned a PowerPoint project to a couple of my classes and I made sure to emphasize not to just read from the slides, but instead to be familiar enough with the slides to where they can just refer to them as a guide. I also have found that using PowerPoint to teach a class is a great tool. I teach ACT seminars to many high school students and the animations, bright colors, and sounds on the slides work to keep the students' attention. I like this website with lots of PowerPoint presentations for writing: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/workshops/pp/index.html posted by: Lynn Jennings

I actually had never used PowerPoint until I was in college. I was taking this course and one of the assignments was to present a research topic using Power Point. I was freaking out at first, but the school had a power PointPoint workshop that we could attend. I didn't attend. Instead, I called my younger brother, and he told me to stop freaking out about it and that it was so easy, just to go to the program and play around on it. It really was simple. I'm sure my first PP presentation did not include all the bells and whistles, but it worked out just fine. Posted by Jamie Baer

I am not a huge fan of PowerPoint, since most of my experiences include the Professor just reading, word for word, from the slides. However, here is an article that I found to be interesting about performance increase among students when the lecture comes from a visual presentation, http://rsc.org/pdf/uchemed/papers/1999/31_lowry.pdf. There were numerous articles that expressed the overall benefits of using presentation software in the classroom. I had trouble finding a counter article. Would love some help finding one. Posted by Jamie Baer