Goodbye, boring board work; hello, PowerPoint!
Ever tried to force yourself to listen to Sunday homilies but find your mind wandering somewhere else, no matter how hard you try to concentrate? One Sunday, our priest gave a wonderful explanation of how Jesus used parables to explain deep and complex insights through the use of powerful images. Ironically, while the priest was trying to belabor his point about the appeal of images and symbols, he himself did not use any type of visual aids to enlighten the churchgoers. In other words, he was giving us the boring version of Jesus’ gospel, all the while with an LCD projector flashing a drab PowerPoint slide with only the word homily written on it.
Jobs that require a lot of talking and explaining are constantly challenged by our modern times. These challenges do not just arise from the presence of modern equipment and gadgets. It is the influence and the resulting change in people’s way of thinking brought about by these gadgets that constitute the problem. As more and more people are exposed to instant messaging, interactive social networks and image-loaded videos, it is but natural for them to find a 30-minute speech of pure talk boring and unworthy of one’s full attention.
What is true in church is true as well in school. Gone are the days when teachers can deliver 60 minutes of uninterrupted lecture. Teachers are demanded to incorporate visual aids or encourage group participation and student involvement. Unfortunately, as one study found out, student-centered activities are not effective in the Philippine setting as our class size is too large and our materials, too few.
Last May, our school’s teaching was greatly revolutionized after Xavier School donated 20 TV sets to equip our bare classrooms. The television sets soon encouraged teachers to bring their laptop and deliver a PowerPoint presentation in aid of teaching.
Since then, magic has happened inside the classroom. The best contribution of a PowerPoint is simply the power of the visual image. For the past two years, it was a constant struggle to teach students how to make adaptations of foreign literature in the Philippine setting. This year, it only took me one session, thanks to that viral e-mail pictures of Philippine transformers where Bumblebee became Bumblejeep and Megatron became Megatren, complete with robotic pictures of a jeep and LRT trains. Instantly, the students were able to grasp that all they had to do was inject elements of Philippine culture in order to stage a witty adaptation.
With the PowerPoint, teachers can say goodbye to long hours of cutting paper, dipping pentel pens into bottled refills, and cutting masking tape just to produce a good visual aid. As a language teacher, the PowerPoint comes in handy to practice students. A regular dose of grammar drills at the start of every class is enough to correct the grammatical errors that students keep committing. With the easy facilitation of questions, students are thus given more exercises before taking a quiz or a test, whereas before, the number of exercises was dependent on how many Manila papers the teacher could prepare beforehand.
There are also countless activities to simulate, thanks to PowerPoint. One of the most useful tips my former department chair taught me was the use of hyperlinks. Through hyperlinks, he was able to play jeopardy and it certainly served as a good review for the students. Taking inspiration from his activity, I was able to recreate a simplified version of the classic game “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?’” to introduce world literature. The detective game was also connected to an investigatory research project, thus making an intimidating activity fun and exciting.
Best of all, with the help of the PowerPoint, there is more time for thinking inside the classroom and less time for board work. Important questions and big ideas may be flashed on screen, thus giving time for students to analyze and think about each word and phrase, which is an entirely different experience from mere listening.
These are just some of the many ideas a teacher can do with a PowerPoint. Skillful teachers may benefit a lot from it by choosing which points to project and emphasize for the student. Creative and resourceful teachers, too, can create games, activities, even interactive mini-AVP presentations that will certainly appeal to today’s generation of students. Come to think of it, prestigious schools already make use of different technologies to advance student learning. If we fail to introduce these modern aids and tools in Philippine education, we are not just going to be left behind by industrialized nations, but more so, by our 21st century, tech-savvy students who will deem teacher talk and Manila papers unappealing and irrelevant to the modern world.
