Tom Rocklin
Center for Teaching
The University of Iowa

Imagine a learning technology that:

• is insensitive to individual students' backgrounds, interests, and prior knowledge,
• does nothing to tell you about whether or not your students are "getting it."
• presents material in a strictly linear fashion, and
• encourages students to passively absorb information.

Did you think I was describing PowerPoint¹? In fact, I was . . . and I wasn't.

Tom Creed's recent essay in the National Teaching and Learning Forum reflected one side of conversations I have been having with some of my colleagues recently. Creed characterized PowerPoint in terms similar to those I used above but then noted that "using PowerPoint doesn't necessarily make you a bad person." Since I sometimes use PowerPoint in my teaching, I was relieved. Then the other shoe fell. Creed went on to claim that "it does, however, mean that your emphasis is on the quality of your presentation rather than your students' learning." So much for my sense of reassurance.

Being more concerned with presentation than with learning is not the hallmark of a progressive teacher. In fact, it probably rates somewhere near the top of many people's lists of pedagogical sins. I have no doubt that PowerPoint can support, and even encourage, very bad teaching, but I don't count its use among my instructional sins. In fact, I think that any pedagogically interesting technology can support and encourage both good and bad teaching.

Talking about the pedagogical value of a particular technology is complex. Most pedagogically interesting technologies (e.g., the combination of paper and ink) are so flexible and can be put to so many uses that it is impossible to identify their intrinsic value. Rather, the value of the technology will depend on the ways in which it is used. For example, Cliff Notes and the one minute paper both rely on paper and ink as their underlying technology, but have very different pedagogical values.

Still, each technology does, by its nature, encourage certain strategies. If I have a hammer, but no electric screw gun, I am more likely to assemble a deck with nails than screws, whether nails are the better fastener or not. If I have a griddle but no waffle iron, I'm more likely to cook pancakes than waffles. Likewise, given the availability of a convenient, inexpensive copier, I am more likely to hand out copies of a quiz than write the questions on the board.

Given these complexities, it does not make much sense to talk about the pedagogical value of a particular technology. Instead, I think we are better off asking what pedagogically useful things we can do with a particular technology. Before I turn to the task of identifying pedagogically useful applications of PowerPoint, allow me a brief aside. Much of what can be done with PowerPoint can be done with blackboards, whiteboards, overhead projectors, photographic slides, flip charts and other technologies. Whether PowerPoint is better for a particular task than other display technologies will depend on the task, and maybe more importantly, on local conditions. Given a particular room, with a particular arrangement, a particular class, and a particular instructor, any of these might be the technology of choice. As you read my thoughts about useful applications of PowerPoint in teaching and learning, you may find yourself thinking (for example) "I could do that just as well (and cheaper!) with a flip chart." Be assured that there are other readers out there (perhaps because of the legibility of their writing, or the size of their classes) thinking, "PowerPoint would be much better than a flip chart for doing that."

To see how PowerPoint might be pedagogically useful, join me in reading the teaching journal of the fictitious Professor Pearl.

October 2

I knew from the minute papers I collected at the end of the last class that students might have serious difficulties with any of four concepts that were relevant to what I wanted them to work on today. For example, many students confuse random assignment and random selection in the context of experimental design. I certainly hope that the reading they are doing will help, but you never know. I made up a series of slides to help explain the difference. The first shows a large group of people (I just used the PowerPoint clip art, since I can't draw) representing the population. In the next slide, a random subset of the people are in a contrasting color and pulled apart from the main group. That's the randomly selected sample, and I labeled them as such. I made sure to use a dark color and a light color so that even in a gray scale print they were distinguishable (I wish we had a color printer and copier!). Then I made a third slide, with a random subset of the sample pulled over to an area labeled "group 1" and the rest pulled over to an area labeled "group 2." That illustrates random assignment.

I printed a set of handouts (3 to a page, so there was only one page and lots of room for the students to annotate). I also converted the slide show and put it on the course web site just in case students find that more convenient at some point. Now that I've had some practice, all of that is pretty easy. Finally, I saved a copy on the departmental server and entered an appropriate set of keywords. I'm sure glad that we all agreed to do that--we can find and share slides much more easily than we used to.

In fact, I borrowed slides on classical conditioning from Tracy. They have some really useful animations that seem to help students see the time sequence in the prototypical paradigm. The most charitable thing I can say about Tracy's aesthetic sense is that it is pretty nearly completely opposite to mine. Luckily, I can fix most of the damage by just switching to a template I like better. That way I don't have to look at the pink text on a green background. I printed these, too. Too bad the animation doesn't work on paper.

Looking at Tracy's slides gave me an idea. I could animate the random selection of participants by showing a die rolling to decide whether each individual was included. Each selected person would then move over to the selected group. Same thing would work for random assignment--maybe with a coin flip. I have to talk to Tracy and see if I can learn more about animation.

I made up short presentations on the other two topics that students might have problems with, too. I wasn't sure which (if any) of these I would need, but it was nice to know I had them if I did need them.

Most of today's time was spent on a group project. I made up a slide with the roles (e.g., recorder, reporter) that needed to be filled and the rules for filling them (e.g., recorder is the person whose student ID number ends in the highest two digits). Next I made up a slide with the steps for today's group project including approximate times for each step. I find that keeping students on schedule is often pretty tough, so I've taken to providing them with lots of support. When we get started on the project, I'll fill in the actual clock times by which each step should be finished. Then, as they work, I'll dim each step when it should be finished. Although I always hand out a piece of paper with the steps listed, I find it helps the groups' process managers if they can point to the screen and say "Look, we need to be on the next step."

I also made up a set of slides with a generic outline of the summary presentation that I want each group to make at our next class meeting. That way, the recorder from each group can easily create some slides for the reporter to use in the presenation. This kind of scaffold really helps them stay organized. I put a copy of the slides on a floppy for each group, and a downloadable version on the server in case someone loses or damages a floppy.

I arrived at class a few minutes early. This semester is great. The room I teach in has a great projection system and an ethernet connection to the network, so I can just show my slides off the server. I rebooted the computer (my little superstitious good luck act), started PowerPoint and Netscape (I never know when I'll need something off the Web) and was ready to go.

Next semester will be less nice. I'm scheduled to teach in the basement of TRR where it takes an act of God or a good relationship with the secretary of the Linguistics department to even get an overhead projector. I'll have to convert slides I want to use to transparencies, which PowerPoint does decently, but not perfectly. Of course, I'll have to remember to bring the right ones, and since I often don't go in a pre-planned order, I'll have to mess with shuffling around in them to find the right ones when I need them. I'll lose color and animations, too. Oh, well . . .

When our organizational business was done, we got started on the project. As I circulated among the groups, it was clear that the random assignment/random selection distinction was causing problems, so I called everyone's attention to the front, handed out the handouts I had made, and did a 5 minute mini-lesson. Later, because of some of what I was seeing when I circulated among the groups, I suggested that each group send one representative up to make sure they had a handle on classical conditioning. While the others worked, I used Tracy's slides and did a mini-lesson with the representatives and then sent them back to their groups. In some groups, they simply confirmed that the group's understanding was on target, but in others they had to do a little bit of teaching.

Class ended before some of the groups were finished. I've got to get that time management thing under control! Some of the groups will get together again, others will work it out over e-mail, but they'll all be prepared to present next class meeting. I made sure to tell them that if they got stuck on the other issues for which I had prepared slides they could see the slides on the Web.

One of the things I like about having them use PowerPoint (besides for the organization it lends) is that the recorder and reporter roles split more easily. It's easier to speak from well-organized slides than from scribbled notes--which is what the recorder used to produce when I did this sort of thing.

All in all, I'm pleased with the way class went. Each of the groups is coming up with a different and interesting approach to the problem I posed, and I'm confident that they'll be able to learn from the other groups' presentations. After they are done, I'll post the presentations on the Web, where the students can review them before the exam and where next semester's class can see them. It will also be nice for people considering taking the class to be able to see what sorts of things we do.

I have one more thing to get done today, if I can. Next week I'm going to need to lecture on some of the stuff I heard at a conference last month. I don't usually lecture much, but this is really exciting stuff that I want to share with the class, and I just don't have anything appropriate to give them to read on it. PowerPoint is really well-adapted to preparing lectures like this. It integrates nicely with my word processor, helps me stay organized, is flexible as to what kind of output I want, and helps me keep things legible and neat for the students. It'll be easy to give the students skeletal notes to support their note taking, too. Well, off to work on my lecture.

Though the example of Professor Pearl's teaching strategies is both contrived and incomplete, it does illustrate some of the good that might be done with PowerPoint. Does Professor Pearl look like someone more concerned with presentation than learning? I don't think so. The picture I've tried to sketch is not a picture of a perfect teacher, nor have I tried to identify all the ways that PowerPoint might be useful in a class. What I have tried to do is suggest that there are a lot of ways--probably many more than I have imagined--that PowerPoint can help teachers help their students learn. That's what I call a pedagogically useful technology.

Contact:

Tom Rocklin
Center for Teaching
207 Iowa Memorial Union
The University of Iowa
Iowa City IA 52242
Telephone: (319) 335-0757
Fax: (319) 335-0828
E-mail: thomas-rocklin@uiowa.edu