Tech for Teaching.
Escaping the linear hegemony of PowerPoint.
As 21st-century educators, we are called upon to perform a variety of roles. This week’s posts are highlighting online tools that can help us with these tasks.
Photo by Tra Nguyen on Unsplash
One of things instructors do is present information. Even if we have flipped our classroom - and in many ways online courses are the ultimate flipped classrooms - we are still called upon to inform, explain, elucidate, unpack, and enlighten. In the classroom the standard way of doing this up till about 15-20 years ago was to lecture with the help of a chalkboard and perhaps photographic slides or an overhead projector. Then along came computers and digital projectors and PowerPoint.
PowerPoint is now the standard way of presenting information, both in teaching and at conferences. Well made digital slide presentations can make anyone look smarter than they are, just as substandard ones can make anyone look less intelligent. But one thing they all do is drive the class or presentation in a linear fashion. PowerPoint only knows one direction, and this can turn presentations into trains that can’t be stopped.
It’s for this reason that I’ve come to like Padlet, an app that’s found some popularity with primary and secondary school teachers, but which can also be used in higher education. Many compare it to a bulletin board where you can pin information of almost any type - documents, images, video, audio, websites. And that’s what I like most about it. Whereas a PowerPoint presentation is a summary of information, a Padlet board can contain the actual information you’re talking about it. You can also present that information in a number of ways - as a linear narrative for sure, but also as a concept map, a kanban board, a timeline, or just a messy bulletin board.
The best thing about it for instructors is that you can use it to collect all the information you want to share with students on a particular topic, and then just teach from the Padlet. You don’t have to set up a presentation, you simply present the information you’ve collected or put together (though it’s flexible enough that, should you want it to be more presentation-like, it can handle that, too.) Any instructor who teaches with a slide deck has faced the inevitable question from students: can we get a copy of the slides? It’s an annoying request for most instructors. With Padlet, the question is moot; you give students access to the Padlet as a matter of course so that they read and study the documents and links you’re presenting and discussing.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 56/60.