I did want to ask your opinion of the differences between PowerPoint and Keynote. Clearly you’re a Keynote user. I’ve only ever used PPT, but I’ve been frustrated enough by it to consider shelling out the $70 or so to buy the iWork suite. Your opinion would be welcome.

Anyhow, I’m sending your pdf version (notes included) to our color printer.

This is a ‘please, please, read’ for my staff.

Thanks.

PowerPoint won’t make a weak teacher great. This thing isn’t a revolutionary approach to [x]. It’s nothing without a good teacher behind it, setting up the slides.

But it enriches the status quo in enough small ways – better classroom management in the same class, more visuals attached to the same curriculum, a happier teacher at the same school – to account for a large difference in classroom disposition, if not engagement also, if not achievement itself.

@Karen: I surveyed my classes at the end of last year and PowerPoint was in the top list of things they thought I should keep for future generations. I mean, it didn’t beat out “donut parties.”

That’s where the hard data ends and the anecdotal stuff starts, though.

I was back to the status quo last year for a period when a bulb blew out. I wrote down a few notes at the board. The students waited for me to finish and then copied the notes themselves. No one – least of all me – was very happy.

This thing has given me a greater appreciation for visuals and I find I issue fewer notes and, instead, we talk around pictures. They write what they think is necessary. For example, they describe the difference between two solids and explain what to do about it.

These conversations and this kind of engagement never happened in my classes before I found a method for putting visuals up on the board quickly and cheaply.

@Alice: No problem with charts/tables except that you can’t fit a lot of information on it before it becomes unreadable. You have an image projected on your board that’s maybe five feet by six feet. Imagine how many words you can reasonably write (in overhead or whiteboard marker) in that space. Like, not a lot. And yet people consistently empty the entire book, the entire quarterly chart, the entire stock prospectus into that same space using PowerPoint.

Notebook is made specifically to educators and works on the concepts as powerpoint and so is an easy shift to make … the kicker is that it is free … download and try …

http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Support/Downloads/default.htm

I’m in the process of having different grade levels doing multimedia projects, so I will be looking to this as part of that mix.

One use of PowerPoint in elementary that I didn’t see you discuss (but was alluded to) was the use of it as a chart. There are lots chant charts used in language arts instruction which can be done on a white board (but then I have to re-write it each time), paper (good for that one year, or else I have to store it and at one-three charts a week, that’s a lot of paper), O/H transparency (I never kept up cleaning them, and was always behind filing them, and the kids just can’t get the hang of filing them well), or PowerPoint (permanent, ready for next year, and you can store it on a jump drive). Is your argument that it dulls the “palate” for using slideshows well (with photos/images) by using it this way?

To piggyback off Karen’s questions:
Do you know how well your students do in their next math class? Next year, how will they fare compared to the students who didn’t have you? And how do your students perform comparatively on any state exams?

Thanks,
Frank

Oh well. Live and learn.