I’ve been thinking about David’s post a while back discussing strategies for effective PowerPointing. In writing instruction, one of the best ways to get students to begin writing with confidence is to have them “write what they know.” What they know is less important than that they develop the ability to explore and express it. Such an assignment implicitly takes some of the focus off of the content, and moves it onto the form. Though those two elements of writing are never completely separable, it’s often helpful to have assignments that focus on one more than the other.
I’m not sure that students are ever given much of an opportunity to learn to present or to PowerPoint in this way, to “PowerPoint what they know.” Would this be helpful as a freshman year assignment in some type of intro course? (I’m of the mind, by the way, that all freshmen should be taking a required media literacy course in their freshmen years… this would fit perfectly in that class).
I once worked with a freshmen class that used PowerPoint to create documentaries about their families, with embedded movies, audio interviews, and images. The goal of the assignment was to get students to break out of the PowerPoint box, and to get them to construct a narrative through the medium. The only rules were no clip art and no gratuitous animation. I gave them a workshop on PowerPoint, helped them storyboard their presentations, and then assisted them with the programming. Finally, they showed their work to the class. This assignment was a successful way for them to master the software and develop their voices at the same time, with the added bonus of creating community in the classroom through the sharing of personal information.
All of what I’ve written above is just prelude to the PowerPoint slides included below, which are examples of the more serious work that some Baruch students might produce if we give them the chance to PowerPoint what they know. Click on the image to read it.
(Slides taken from here, with a warning that readers not of the hip-hop nation may be offended).
This is great, Luke. These slides as well as some of the other graphs and charts available via the link could be very useful in helping students prep for Task 2 of the CUNY Proficiency Exam (CPE) which, among a few other things, asks students to interpret and compare at least two graphs or charts. While Baruch students generally do very well on the CPE (we have the highest pass rate within CUNY), they tend to have the hardest time with Task 2 since they are not used to dealing with graphical representations of data, as hard as that may be to believe. X-axis: Money, Y-axis: Problems. Very useful.