No more death by PowerPoint! Why is it important to leave PowerPoint behind?

PowerPoint has been the staple of slideshow presentations for many years now, but it has its problems. We’ve all sat (or slept) through many PowerPoint presentations where the presenter has read every single word of their seemingly hours-long slideshow at a snail’s pace, in a dull monotone so perfectly steady that you could tune an orchestra to it. Bonus points if this presenter read as if they’d never seen the content before, let alone written it, or if their entire script was on the slides, meaning that the listener must sit through the presenter droning through the same piece of text that they have by now read 4 or 5 times. It’s never a good experience when this happens.

Despite many of us unfortunately experiencing this sort of “Death by PowerPoint”, it has been found that there is no difference in academic achievement between classes that are taught with PowerPoint and traditional “chalk and talk” classes (Baker, Goodboy, Bowman, & Wright, 2018). This could suggest to us educators-to-be that PowerPoint is not the problem – we just need to get better at using it.

So how can we better engage students with our presentations? We could switch to different software, but as shown by Baker et al (2018), this alone is likely to have no affect on learning or engagement. Instead, we have to make our presentations more interesting in much the same way as we would with a normal lesson. We must not write all of the content on the slides, we must interact with our class/audience, and, above all, must speak like a normal person, with varying pitch and tempo. All of this makes a lesson/presentation feel more natural and engaging. The issue is cannot be simply solved by “leaving PowerPoint behind”.

References:

Baker, Goodboy, Bowman, & Wright. (2018). Does teaching with PowerPoint increase students’ learning? A meta-analysis. Computers & Education,126, 376-387. Retrieved from: https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0360131518302070?token=8A582DD697B69B2B7351E0E2188040D29C244DAFCCC62A4B1A036FAEDE5116DC329D0F3D510394411633C9D4C5EA627D