blog 7

I feel that there are many advantages to using presentation software in the K-12 classroom. One advantage I could think of from the top of my head would be how organized I could make my lessons. By using tools like Powerpoint, I will be able to effectively organize my major points and concepts in a timely manner. For younger students, pictures and images will make it easier to understand my lessons. A disadvantage that I can see with using presentation software would be that my students might pay too much attention to my slides and less attention on my actual lecture. This, I feel, could hinder the overall lesson I was trying to teach.

There are many ways I could use Powerpoint to support student learning. As it says in Chapter 5, Displaying Information is the key to creating understanding. Powerpoint is able to accommodate for many of the learning styles and therefore be a major tool in teaching. Students with learning styles that are more based around visuals and graphics would better understand my lessons if I use Powerpoint to display my content. Powerwoint offers a great opportunity to enhance the learning of students.

An issue that interests me about educational technology is the use of computers as a tool to help students learn. Though computers may be a great resource to organize content and information to present to students, I feel that they may also hinder the overall learning styles of students. I feel this way especially toward lower-grade level classes. By having computers being used by young students to obtain information and lessons, I fear that students may become too dependent on the use of them. And when they get older, they may have a harder transition to learning through lectures and actual person to person teaching. I feel that computers, compared to actual lecture teaching, is not interactive enough to compete with straight lecture teaching.