The Irony of Powerpoint

"These same teachers often ask their students to create slide shows in lieu of writing papers or as supplements for oral presentation. When these assignments come with quantifiable criteria, we do not see the value in them." 

-Troy Hicks & Kristen Turner

       Digital Literacy is not a new term for teachers. It is one that has been talked about for decades but now we, as a society, have come to a point where it is time to really delve deeper into what it means to teach it. Most educators translate this phrase "Digital Literacy", as adding technology into the classroom so students are more comfortable with it, and oh boy how it is so much more than that. Technology has such power in our society with the things you can research, watch, add your opinion to, and even create with the right tools. All of that is available for use, yet we have come to a point where the usual digital literacy you see in the classroom is nothing but...a POWERPOINT (sometimes it does a cool transition effect between slides😩). Let's really talk about this. PowerPoints are an amazing tool where a student can use their creativity and information they learned to guide the audience through a presentation in a fun and informative way, when used correctly. As this digital literacy article explains, most teachers will add in their requirements for the presentation like so:

~Needs to be at least 10 slides

~Needs to use one of the pre-made themes

~Needs a picture

By adding these requirements you are not setting up a base line for what the presentations will be but a wall or limit on what the students will create. This takes the creativity and the originality out of the presentation, making it one of those classes where you have to sit through PowerPoint after PowerPoint, with nothing exciting or informative happening. I think the best example of this is shown through something I've experienced in an actual college course. This was last year, I was taking a Biology class, and we had our end of the year presentations that required a PowerPoint. Everyone knew it was presentation day so that meant sitting through the usual, everyone knows those days. I was half asleep until one guy came up and his PowerPoint was a shock to the whole classroom. It started out on a slide that had a background picture of static, with a static noise playing in the background. Well that woke everyone up. Every slide, he had something new to either make one student ask a question or make the another student laugh. You can have an animated picture, you can have a timer linked into your slide, you can have music playing while words move around on the screen! His presentation didn't meet the time or slide number requirement but the teacher still loved it, and so did the class. This couldn't be more important. This is the perfect example of the possibility of PowerPoint compared to the baseline, a jump from augmentation to redefinition. 

The new and improved is already here and only getting better by the minute. From different mind-mapping tools such as Mondomo for students, to collaborative websites like Loomio for educators. We need to find and research new tools. They are already out there, we just need to utilize them.