Week 14 - PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint can be your best friend, or your worst enemy.

For my field experience, we taught a unit about Ancient Rome. It was a really fun unit to teach and there was a lot of fun information available for us to use in our lessons. The more that we studied about Ancient Rome, the more we learned that there are some great primary sources available to use in our lessons. We found that the best way to show the students all of the pictures and primary sources about Ancient Rome was to make a PowerPoint Presentation (which we used for several of our lessons).

This was very well received by the students and they just loved this medium of teaching. On my last lesson about Ancient Roman technologies, their people and forms of entertainment, I made a PowerPoint presentation for the lesson. I didn't practice the presentation during lunch because my last PowerPoint that was presented earlier in the week worked great and I had no problems. However, this time it didn't work out. It was a very frustrating few minutes while we tried to figure out what our plan B was going to be. We saved the presentation on a flashdrive and tried to present it from the teachers computer instead. However, it didn't work on that computer either. It turned out to be the projector that was having the problem.

Plan C here we come! Our final solution to the problem was to just huddle everyone together to watch the PowerPoint presentation on my computer screen. While this worked okay in the end, it took a few minutes to figure it all out and it was a little harder to maintain control of the class when they were sitting so close in the dark room. Had my lesson not had so many valuable pictures of the items we were presenting, I would have just abandonded the PowerPoint and just talked about the slides that I was going to present. However, my lesson relied heavily on the photo's that were included in the presentation.

The computer was a large part of presenting most of our lessons and the students really found it interesting and kept their focus on the lessons better. It was fun being able to use this valuable resource in our teaching.

Following is a slideshow of some of the pictures that were included in my PowerPoint presentation.