Last week, we were assigned a PowerPoint project: a project aimed to go in-depth with PowerPoint and make a presentation for a fictitious lesson that is relevant to our future career. As one of the few Science Education majors, I chose my presentation to be on the Strong Nuclear Force, something relatively easy but still fascinating, at least to me.
Looking back on the creation of the project, I realized exactly how much time was needed for constructing lesson plans and presentations alike. Over the course of a week, I spent six hours on the presentation: setting up slide transitions, embedding videos, and finding the right sources to allow me to calculate the diameter of a Uranium-235 nucleus. Cool, right?
But sometimes I lay awake at night and formulate my teaching philosophy. I tend to shy away from PowerPoints because students would just focus on scribbling down the ideas instead of critically thinking about them, even ideas they had a complete understanding in. I see myself as a teacher who can deliver a lesson without much technological aid and be flexible enough to answer student questions as they occur, as opposed to rigidly following and reusing PowerPoints. This was my initial reaction.
However, this project showed some of the usefulness of having visual aids embedded in, especially images and videos which would be time consuming and cumbersome to work with mid-lesson. Thus, I can see the potential for PowerPoint for my personal style of teaching. I can't say that I will make PowerPoints as in-depth and complete as someone who religiously uses them, but PowerPoints are a convenient way for me as a science teacher to display images and videos to give those visual learners some leeway.
Perhaps I will be off on a chalkboard explaining all the forces acting on objects while a PowerPoint has an interactive equation slide and corresponding visuals. This is so crazy, it just might work.
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