Sunday, January 15, 2012

PowerPoint Writing


Winter PowerPoint

This lesson isn't real fancy.  It just involves PowerPoint.  I asked my students to create an informational PowerPoint about Winter using their own schema.  They needed 8 total slides, a title page and 7 informational slides.  

They could only use Clip Art for their images.  They could not go on
line and search for images.  I did this for two reasons. 

Number 1, I wanted to save time.  When they go online to look for pictures they can spend 30 minutes looking for the perfect image.  Using Clip Art limits how many images they can look at before finding the perfect image saving a whole lot of time. 

Number 2, I did not want to worry about copyright.  Only allowing Clip Art guaranteed that the students had permission to use the pictures and I didn't need to ask where they came from because I already knew.  

And for a bonus reason, the students had to come up with all their information on their own.  Without access to the internet students couldn't just cut and paste their information.  I've also noticed that students will copy images from the web that have a picture with text.  They then try to count the image's text as their text for the slide.

Finally, I don't like transition and sound effects so I don't require them.  If students want to include them they can.  I do like adding "Table of Contents" that use hyperlinks so I teach though but don't require them because they are not necessary for an effective PowerPoint. 

All students completed their "Winter" PowerPoint presentations after a 1 hour lab and a 35 minute lab.   That's the power of Clip Art.

The week after the "Winter" PowerPoint, I had my students create a "School" PowerPoint using the exact same guidelines.


The Directions I passed out to my students are below. 
______________________________________________________

Winter PowerPoint
Directions:
Create a PowerPoint that discusses what people traditionally do during the winter.
·        Include a Title Page
o   Title
o   Your name
o   1 picture


 







·        7 Information Slides
o   1 picture and at least one sentence explaining what the picture shows

 




o   All pictures must come from Clip Art.  You will not be using the internet for this project.
o   When you have finished, e-mail your PowerPoint to me

1 comment:

  1. I had my students create a Powerpoint about themselves where they addressed several specific questions in their presentation and had to include a given number of clip art items.

    What I found out was that most of my students thought they understood how to create a Powerpoint but they didn't. They did not understand that they should have used bullets instead of long paragraphs; most didn't seem to know how to create a background; and they didn't understand how to use the space of the slide with several losing text off the slide. These students all had computers in middle school and in elementary school. Scary but I think this may be due to the fact that many "computer" teachers have spent more time focusing on keyboard than anything else.

    Did your students experience any of these issues?

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