I feel that the course material dictates the method of presentation. PowerPoint presentations may not be the best approach for all courses. For example some computer application courses have the information right in front of the student on the computer application screen. It may be more beneficial to lecture using the actual application. In other courses I find that a PowerPoint presentation is a good complement of the material that is in the text book and I use them I feel very effectively in a number of my courses.
So true. Leave the lines blank on the PowerPoint presentation and you can fill them in as you have the discussion. I have found this works great.
I am not a big fan of power-point. Most presentations that I have attended, where power-point is used, the presenter reads each slide. I beleive some power-point presentations make the presenter look under-prepared.
One way to make powerpoint more interactive is to have it open on a smart board without running the slideshow. Then you can edit information, often replacing predictable information with more pointed information, which allows your students to feel like the information is current and evolving.
I also dislike it. Part of my reason for this, I'm sure, is that I have to attend lots of workshops to support my license-- and virtually all of them consist of powerpoint stuff that goes on for five or six hours, with always an associated stack of pages on which all the slides are reproduced. I prefer to write as I talk: for one thing, it makes it more likely that I will vary my approach to material from one time to the next-- in other words, it allows much more spontaneity.
The nice thing about powerpoint, is you can create slides that show the material you plan to cover during the class, and print and hand out those slides. Then students can SEE what will be covered, and can also take notes on the page and keep those notes.
