AELR Blog points to ULCA law student’s harsh view of PowerPoint in the classroom.
“Based on the best available data, [the student notes,] I’m prepared to theorize that Powerpoint-based classes are always boring.” He identifies several problems with using PPT in the classroom, including this one: “In all three of my Powerpoint experiences, the prof was plenty smart and interesting. But the Powerpoint was so bad that it infected them, and made them seem much duller than they were.”
Point well taken. I tend to use PPT for one shot presentations, but I can see his point that in a course setting, they could easily become tiresome. As the student admits, though, using PPT can help organize the lecture for the professor. This is certainly true for me.
Perhaps a hybrid approach might work best for me. Have the PPT, but just display it on my own laptop with the projector off. Then if I have something in particular that I wanted to illustrate, I could turn on the projector for just those slides. We’ll see how it goes.