Grab students’ attention before class with PowerPoint. Yeah, that’s right, with PowerPoint.
October 20, 2008
For those of you who use PowerPoint (or are willing to, when it’s useful), you might consider creating a series of short slide shows that can run in automated mode as your students are entering your classroom. I’ve been doing this for several years now at conference presentations, and it works really well to get the audience engaged and warmed up as they come in and find seats. They actually start talking to each other about the session topic!
I use a combination of these kinds of things for my conference pre-presentation shows:
- Questions and answers (a la movie trivia quizzes while you’re waiting for a movie to start)
- Quotes related to the presentation
- Questions without answers that make people think about issues that will be raised
- Facts, figures, charts, or other simple data I want to reinforce
Teachers can use this to remind students of content from the previous class, or as a way to introduce content in the current class. Or perhaps as an additional reminder to students about upcoming tests or papers.
You can set up any slide show in Power Point to run automatically, and you can determine the amount of time each slide will display before the next one appears. -ELIZABETH A. EVANS
Elizabeth A. Evans works for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Information Technology Services.
Related Stuff:
Avoid Killing Students’ Interest and Attention with Power Point
