TECHNOLOGY USE IN CLASS

PowerPoint is an extremely useful tool in the classroom and can be used for a number of purposes, assessment being only one. Ours, however called on the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, asking students to look at pictures and try to come up with the best possible answer. These are just a few ideas for class-wide assessment games that reinforce newly learned information as well as recall previously learned ideas, terms and concepts.
PowerPoint is an extremely useful tool in the classroom and can be used for a number of purposes, assessment being only one. Ours, however called on the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, asking students to look at pictures and try to come up with the best possible answer. These are just a few ideas for class-wide assessment games that reinforce newly learned information as well as recall previously learned ideas, terms and concepts.
There is also a great feature in PowerPoint that can be used to create an interactive multiple-choice quiz; this feature allows you to link non-consecutive slides together so that each of the choices will take you to a different slide, and only the correct answer will lead you to the next question in the quiz! While this quiz cannot be accurately used for formal assessment, it is a great way for students to see what they can remember about a lesson or unit and they immediately know whether their first responses are correct.
Many posters may try to present several different ideas in the same space, while a PowerPoint presentation allows for the same information to be broken up in to separate thoughts
No matter who uses PowerPoint (whether student or teacher), everyone in the classroom can benefit from the use of this particular technology because it is so engaging and provides opportunities for visual stimuli. Students who are more visually and auditory learners can greatly benefit from a teacher’s use of this software; relative pictures and sound clips can easily be integrated into a slideshow.
For example, if
the teacher is trying to explain a certain animal with which students are not familiar, several photographs of that animal can easily be made into slides that are scrolled through. This gives students an accurate visual representation of the animal that they may not have had otherwise. If students have never heard the sound this animal can make, a sound clip can be inserted into one of the slides. There are so many possibilities other than animals, such as different types of machines or people from different countries and the languages they speak.

I definitely plan to make good use of Microsoft PowerPoint in my classroom using the ideas that I have mentioned, and I will also try to think of new ways to use it as well. I will have to be careful about how much I use it, though; I don’t want it to be something with which students become bored.

One of my professors last year used it every single day in class, and I really got tired of it, especially since he even used the exact same background every time. Another professor I had also used it every day but switched the settings and used a lot of pictures and diagrams, and I cannot remember getting all that bored with his lectures because of it. While using this great tool, I will be sure to keep things as novel as possible so that it will continually benefit my instruction and assessment