Stop spending all your time making PowerPoints! What you need to know as an IT educator instead.

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“PowerPoint as an innovative tool for teaching and learning in modern classes”

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TRANSCRIPT:

Stop spending so much time making PowerPoints. 

If I had to give one piece of advice to brand new, IT, information security, software development, technical instructors, that would be it, just stop spending so much time making PowerPoints. 

So in this video, what I wanted to do is share with you a couple of my tips about how to effectively use PowerPoint as a teaching tool in technical courses and hands on related courses. And so the thing that I see, and I’ve seen in the past over the last almost 20 years, is that when people are brand new to teaching, people are, you know, very passionate about their topic. 

They want to know, they want to make sure that they can answer every single question that their students ask them is that they start to over prepare, and spend so much time on the content and making sure you know, every little thing, every little, every little piece about the content. And as a result, all that information gets put into PowerPoint. And so you’re creating these very elaborate PowerPoints, maybe you’re giving a 30 minute lecture or a 45 minute lecture, maybe even a 20 minute lecture.

 And you’re spending all this time putting together a PowerPoint. And when you should be using that time for other things, and be spending all this time over preparing is the first step to burnout. And that is not something that you want to have happen, especially in your first year of teaching. If you’re teaching online, you’re teaching for a training company, you’re teaching for yourself. Teaching for a college or university doesn’t matter. That is the first step to burnout. And we don’t want you to burn out. 

We need people like you who are willing to take your time and your expertise and help develop the next generation of technology professionals. So how should you use PowerPoint? I’m not saying you shouldn’t use PowerPoint, I know that there’s some things out there, Steve Jobs infamously said that, that, you know, if you have to use PowerPoint, you don’t know you don’t know what you’re talking about. Right. 

And I do believe that there’s a time and a place for a PowerPoint presentation, I’ll give you an example. I was giving a presentation to a group of high school teachers about how to teach computer science. And we had plan and plan to plan and put together this whole thing. And, you know, I had like three slides I was supposed to talk to. And I got up and I just started talking, I didn’t pay any attention to my slides. Because I knew what it was that I was talking about. I knew in my head exactly what I wanted to get across all the points, I wanted to make all the stories I wanted to tell I’ve given this presentation many, many, many times that I wasn’t reliant on the PowerPoint to keep me on track. 

But it’s your first time giving a lecture on something your webinar and something PowerPoints are a great way to keep you on track to make sure that you cover all the talking points that you want to hit, that you share the stories that you want to share, you spend a lot of time preparing for this, you’re not just going to go to a class session and just start talking off the top of your head. But you can use PowerPoint to help sort of keep you on track. But what you don’t want to do is have this novel across the screen on your PowerPoint page, right? So you can have your bullet points and maybe a nice graphic that’s related to your, to your to your topic. It gives students something to look at something for students to engage with, but it also helps keep you on track. So that is one way that you can use PowerPoint. 

You can also use diagrams, graphics pictures, don’t spend a ton of time putting all of these together, though. 

Okay. So I’ll give you another example here. When I was student teaching, I’m licensed in elementary, middle school computer science, and you have student teach. And so I was doing teaching in second grade. And the teacher that I was working with my master teacher, she had a very blank classroom didn’t have a lot of stuff hanging up, the things that were hanging up or the students work. They said that they can be proud of, you know, their work and that sort of thing. But you didn’t have any elaborate bulletin boards, whereas all the other teachers had these like fancy bulletin boards, they’d say, after all the time and you know, spend all this time and money on a bulletin board. She didn’t have any fancy bulletin boards. And she said to me, she said, think back to your own second grade experience. Do you remember the bulletin board that your teacher had in the classroom at any given time? And the answer to that is obviously no. 

So think of PowerPoint is sort of like this bulletin board that it can be used in the moment to help prove a point to help get your make an impact to help get the topic across that you want to share with your students. Sorry, my if you’re watching the video Coal is popping up in my video here. But you can use it, you know, to prove a point in that moment, all right. So you can use diagrams, use graphics, use pictures, but don’t spend a ton of time putting those together. All right. Um, and you know it again, it just it shouldn’t be a book it you This is not the time to write a book, this is, this is a time to put some notes together for your students, and for yourself. And then what you can do is you can hand the PowerPoint out then as a handout After you have completed the lecture, or you can hand it out even beforehand and give students a place to write notes. 

What you don’t want to do is have everything on your PowerPoint slide that you’re going to talk about, because when you have it up on the screen, nobody’s going to sit there and read that think about how many times you’ve been in a presentation, and there’s Gad, xoops amount of, you know, text on a on a PowerPoint, do you actually read it, probably not. But then sometimes what people will do is they’ll put all this information on a PowerPoint, and then the printed up and then we’ll give it out to their students, or they’ll email it out to their students prior to the lecture when all the students are like, well, I don’t want to pay attention. I don’t want to take notes. 

So you don’t necessarily want to do that either. I but I did find, I found a research article. And I’ll link to this in the, in the description box, if you’re watching this on YouTube, and in the show notes, if you’re watching this or listening to this on my podcast, but I did find a research article that talks about the PowerPoint as an innovative tool for teaching and learning. And so what I want to do is to share with you a couple of the points that the authors make in this article about how to use PowerPoint, in the classroom. And, you know, one of the first points is that of the appropriate keyword there being appropriate use of PowerPoint can enhance the teaching and learning experience for both the students and the faculty or the instructors. Because again, like I said, as an instruct