Tin made a good point about PowerPoint. The two authors in his links also made some good points but haven’t quite nail down a resolution.
Personally, I think the whole current concept of “computer aided chores” is flawed. Especially when dealing with education. Computers are aids for their users, not masters of users as slaves of its applications.
What are we trying to educate primary school students? Certainly, not the use of a specific computer application; not so early in life of that age group for non computing classes anyway.
Like the authors in Tin’s links put it, we should be more concentrate on the content of the projects rather than the working of pointless slide shows. In the case of my son Alec’s two projects this year, they are after all, not projects for a computing class but projects for Science and General Studies. What could be more ironic than making kids use specific computer applications for “General Studies”. Why then do we make them use any kind of platform dependent commercial computer applications?
PowerPoint itself is not the problem of the education. The problem is the decision to choose PowerPoint as a tool for education. Be it good or bad, be it available on PCs as well as on Mac, to the least, it isn’t free. Further more, correct me if I’m wrong for I don’t use PowerPoint myself, doesn’t one need PowerPoint to run and read a PowerPoint document? I have a feeling even if one could compile a PowerPoint document so that PP itself is not needed to read its documents, they may still be platform dependent. Why must we parents buy into any specific profit company’s product? Is there kick back in it for the schools?
For educational purposes, unless we willingly paid to learn how to operate specific applications we shouldn’t be bogged down to what we use. We may indeed be able to afford Macs or PCs, have Keynote 2 or PowerPoint, but why MUST we use them? Why can’t we use what ever applications we feel like, or whatever form of media we so desire such as poster size cardboards and crayons, markers and acetates, DC or DV and TV or digital projectors, Super 8 movie camera and projecters…Total Recall or Matrix like experience changing medical procedures?
If we must use computers, to make a computer document platform independent so that any computer can read and run a document these days would be something one can run on a web browser - HTML (or Java?). Preferably an online generator if possible. Otherwise Adobe Acrobat pdf document is not so difficult to create these day with native converter on Mac and freeware pdf printer driver readily available for PC. One can use any application to create the presentation materials and print to .pdf format. Most online computers, PPC/PDA have free Adobe Acrobat reader already installed for reading .pdf documents.
The point is, students should not be restricted to which form of media for their project presentation unless the exercise is strictly for teaching a specific tool of presentation. Which is not the case in both Alec’s projects this year.
0 Responses to “Power Presentation”