Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Powerpoint Tutorials

This week in IT 486, we have been working on our PowerPoint tutorials. For my tutorial, I selected the topic of Famous Tennesseans. The children were allowed to explore and learn about six famous Tennesseans in history, and then I can take a brief quiz over the material to see what they have learned. I have had a fairly extensive background using PowerPoint so I felt very comfortable in its use. The only aspect of PowerPoint that I had not used yet was the hyperlink, but following Jeff's demonstration on how to create the links throughout the PowerPoint, I found it very easy to use and actually kind of fun. I see how these could be very valuable in the classroom. It could provide children with fun and new ways to learn the content. These could also be used to make games that the children can play individually or as a classroom. This would encourage children in interactive activities as opposed to simply listening to me talk. As useful as these activities would be, I feel it would be too time-consuming to spend eight or more hours to create a six question quiz. I do see these as being useful to present other material maybe in the format of a jeopardy game or other large group activity, but it would be difficult to make them for each and every topic that is covered in class.

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