Why I Still Like PowerPoint

Recently, I had the opportunity to fly to a conference in Southern California. Like most conferences, there were several break-out sessions and in one, the presenter was preparing the projector and had PowerPoint fired up. Out of habit I looked to the lower right of the screen and saw “Slide 1 of 187”. Groan, I thought, 187 slides for a 2-hour presentation. This will be ghastly. And it was.

Now, I do recall doing lectures with an overhead projector and swapping out “transparencies” or (gasp) writing long hand with a permanent marker on long plastic scrolls; and in comparison, the PowerPoint was a welcome relief. The PowerPoint presentation allowed for nicer presentations with color and font changes, images, videos, and animation. We would say that using PowerPoint “brings our lectures to life.”

What we forgot is that the lecturer needed to be alive first for the presentation to be alive as well. And unfortunately, folks began to use PowerPoint as a sort of crutch to (hopefully) create liveliness where none existed. Where the PowerPoint was supposed to support the presentation, it instead was the focus of it. And in many cases, the PowerPoint became the lecture with the lecturer turned presenter only droning on and on the very words that appeared on the screen (double gasp).

But wait, there’s more.

In our highly media saturated culture, students today are bombarded with massive amounts of light, images, video, and sound – as are we all -- to the point where we are literally in a constant noise. Seriously, check yourself. How long can you or I go with silence before we reach for the smart phone for music or to check messages or to… (you’ve heard this before). So the trap that many have fallen into is the thinking that we have to compete with the noise for your attention so that you will hear the lesson through all of the clatter around you. And the solution is to take PowerPoints and make the highly animated with a lot of color changes, sounds, and more.

A few years ago, I was at an education conference in Baltimore where an instructor was proposing this very thing. His PowerPoint presentation was just LOADED with flashy colors, drastic font changes, video, and very loud music. His point, of course, was to “pierce the veil” of noise that surrounds you and get the message (his lecture) home.

Instead, what I noticed for myself was that the presentation was so loud that I could not track my own thoughts. And then I looked around the room and saw everyone – and I mean everyone – passively watching the show. It’s a phenomenon we call “TV Mode”. Watch for this yourself. It is something that occurs when someone is watching television and they instantly become very passive. Some use it to sedate over-active children. It is amazing to watch. And everyone in the room was in TV Mode.

PowerPoints as a tool

All this said, PowerPoint presentation can be effective if you remember to use it as the tool it was designed to be: a support of the presentation and not the presentation itself. To poorly coin a phrase, “PowerPoints don’t bore people; people bore people.”

There are some good PowerPoint presentations, and I have seen many that support textbooks and do it well. Because of the limited format of the slide and the amount of information you can reasonable put on it, the PPT presentation can perfectly become the synopsis of the most important information derived from the chapter. For the student, the PPTs become the instant study-guide for any class. When you are short on time during the week, you can make a quick breeze through the PowerPoints and you will have the gist of the lecture.

In my own studies, I like to have the PowerPoints open while I am reading the text. This “following along” helps me to identify the information that the author thought was most important; thus providing me a greater efficiency in the lesson.

PowerPoints are still an effective tool for any good presentation. We just need to remember that they are here to support us and not the other way around.