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”

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 instructor, it’s going to keep you on track. 

But then it’s also can enhance that learning experience for students give gives people something to look at people something to engage with, that kind of thing. It provides some structure to your presentation, in sort of this professional manner. I know I’m guilty of this, but sometimes when I’m talking without a PowerPoint, and I thought I had an outline put together in my head. But it’s not something I’ve talked about a lot just yet. So it’s a new outline. And I don’t have the outline right in place just yet. Sometimes I can wander off, and I can go back to this thing, come back over here to this thing. 

So the you know, the PowerPoint, again, can provide that structure to your presentation. You can mix media presentation, presentation, graphics, videos, that kind of thing. You can you can embed those in your PowerPoint, but again, don’t spend so much time going out and looking for them and creating graphics. And this meant the other, because what you can do is if you if you really do want to make it a wonderful, spectacular PowerPoint, you know, if you’re teaching a class four or 5678 910 1220 times you’re teaching it over and over and over again, you can continue adding to it, you know, just as each time you each time you teach it because each time you teach it, your presentations going to be a little bit different, it’s going to be maybe get a little bit better, maybe you’re going to find different things, different points that you want to make different stories, you want to share that kind of thing. 

What the other part that’s very handy I mentioned earlier for PowerPoint is that because it’s electronic, you can distribute it to your students. Um, you can do this with Google Slides or any other presentation software as well. It’s not, it’s not just specific to PowerPoint, but you can, you know, distribute that information then your students. And so they can that they can do that. So that also helps, you know, students with any sort of visual or auditory difficulties, it can help them help them in their learning as well. And so like I said, like I mentioned before, they talked about this in this article, too, is that there’s, um, you know, each time you teach a course, you don’t necessarily have to reprint the PowerPoint, right. 

So you can you can make your adjustments that you need to make, it’s not like a book where it’s printed up and it’s in place, and you have to kind of leave it. Whereas with the PowerPoint, you can make on the fly revisions as you need to. And you can let’s see here, I’m going to scroll down here I’m looking at, I’m looking at some notes. And so there are here are some ways you can deliver instructional protocols if you’re teaching in a lab. 

All right, so let’s let’s talk about this. So you are teaching a face to face course in a computer lab. And like now the last thing you want to say you’re teaching is like a computer program that you teach like Java or something like that, right? Let’s say you’re gonna do is like sit there and bore your students to death with just like this PowerPoint about Java, you want to you want to do some hands on stuff as well. You can use PowerPoint as sort of this. You know, this instructional tool to help get your point across but even when you’re teaching a hands on topic, you need to show them the hands on right and let your students do the hands on work. But what you can do is you can put together so you’re you’re getting your students ready to compete to complete a lab and you want to make sure that everybody knows exactly what’s expected of them, you can write out the instructional, you know, protocol, if you will, of what it is that you are expecting students to do in their particular labs, you can gather outcomes of discussions and polls.

So you might use some polling software, you can gather that information, put all that into the PowerPoint as well. You can provide questions and questions and answers, you can do like a q&a type of session. You can do some, let’s see here, you can do some student presentations, you get your students put together presentations, again, teaching them how to use PowerPoint effectively in their presentation versus just making this novel overprepared novel, right. And you can use visuals with or without animation. 

Again, don’t spend a ton of time on animations, because that can actually be a sort of a detriment of using PowerPoint, or Google Slides or whatever in teaching and learning is that you are putting so it’s it’s like this excessive use of graphics, this is sex, excessive use of transitions, things like that, just because you have the ability to do it doesn’t mean you need to do it. Um, it can be very distracting for your students. And then you don’t necessarily want your slides to be very visually boring, I’m probably guilty of this, right, I’m fine. Just putting black and white text up on the screen, I’m good. 

But you also want to make sure that it’s engaging to your students, and they want to look at it right. So make sure that you do make it you know, visually appealing. And then don’t use, you know, inappropriate use of multimedia. So make sure any sort of multimedia that you have in your PowerPoint is actually relevant to what it is that you’re that you’re talking about. And then I’m probably guilty of this, you know, myself that when, like I said earlier, the benefit, one of the benefits of using PowerPoint as an educational tool is that it can help keep you on track your giving you a presentation on security awareness, it can help keep you on track and make sure that you have covered everything it is that you need to cover. You’ve you’ve covered all the topics, you’ve gone over all the activities, you’ve shared all the stories, you want to share all that kind of stuff. 

But because it’s all right there in front of you, sometimes it’s very easy to just start going way too fast and just weapon through the material. Because it’s right there, you don’t have to think you don’t really have to, you know, engage with it, it’s just you’re kind of going through it right. So you want to pay attention that as you’re delivering it, that you’re not just going through this sort of going through the motions thing of like, Alright, this is what’s on this slide. And this is what’s on this slide. 

And this is what’s on this slide, like, slow down, talk about it, share the stories, that kind of thing. Um, and then what’s one of the things that almost always happens every time you’re doing a live session or a live teaching session, especially when it comes to technology is that there’s going to be a technological failure, there almost always is, especially when the stakes are high, you’re on a you’re on a teaching demo for a job interview, something like that you’ve got an observation going on somebody who’s watching you, right? 

You want to make sure that you make backup plans in case there is a technological failure, the projector doesn’t work, you can’t get PowerPoint lowered. You can’t get you know, whatever the school you’re at, doesn’t let you plug in USB drives, and you have it on a USB drive something like that. You want to make sure that you have have that backup plan. But like I said, the goal here is don’t spend so much time putting together a PowerPoint. It’s a wonderful tool to use. It’s a wonderful instructional tool, but it is not the end all be all. Don’t burn yourself out, put together the information that you need to put together be done with it. 

And as you go, just make it a little bit better each time, add more content to it, add more graphics to it, you know, add more slides, whatever whatever it ends up be, it does not need to be perfect the first time through, I promise you it does not need to be perfect. If you look at the teachers, and if your kids are going to school, and some of these teachers have these very elaborately decorated classrooms that didn’t happen their first year of teaching that takes years and years and years of building up sort of your toolkit over time. 

Same goes with your instructional tools that you’re using as an IT instructor. Every time you teach it you’re going to have more and more tools in your tool belt that you can use in your in your classroom with your students or online with your students. Not going to happen the first time around though so again, I’m I’m wanting to share this with you because I think that this is probably the number one thing I see with brand new instructors. 

And I wanted to help any of you who are just getting started teaching I you know, it’s days August 23. We’re starting out a new school year here in the United States. And there might be a lot of you listening who are brand new to teaching or some of you are working in it and you’re considering getting started teaching. Keep this in mind. Don’t spend all your time making PowerPoint. Alright, I’ll see you guys next video.