Summary of Reading

These whole articles are talking about whether or not Microsoft PowerPoint is a good tool for teaching or whether it is a bad tool. In the first article titled PowerPoint is Evil, the author has many points explaining why he thinks PowerPoint is not so good after all. He indicates that the PowerPoints are forcing students to write less and he declares that students learn less if they read or see less. He also talks about how in PowerPoint, you have many slides making the theme you want to say broken up into many sections. He says this is bad because he gives an example of a piece of data and he shows how if you were to put it into PowerPoint, it would become four slides and he says that they are uncomparative, indifferent to content and evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost pointless. He also does not really like the graphs in PowerPoint and describes them as incoherent, encoded lengths, meaningless colour, the logo-type branding. He says that students will understand presentations if they read a lot at a time and he says Powerpoint are actually replacing presentations. The other article is titled PowerPoint is not Evil. In this article, the author talks mainly of how the PowerPoint is not so bad after all even though he really does admit that it is not really perfect. In his article, the author talks about how PowerPoint can really be replaced with a lot of things like boards, notes, books, etc. The good thing with PowerPoint is that it is just so simple that all he has to do is turn on his computer, go to the internet, start PowerPoint, and start preparing what he needs to teach class with. He also talks about an example where he was working at this Organizational Business and they had to do this teaching so he used this method of having many slides and in the end everybody concluded that he did do a good job because the students understood him but the others did more teaching.