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The Power of PowerPoint

The Power of PowerPoint

Marcia Wallenfeldt
Crestwood Intermediate, Crestwood Local Schools

Jan Kelly
Somers Elementary School, Mogadore Local Schools 

The Project

I team-teach with two other fourth grade teachers who share an interest in helping students discover their heritage. Previously we have had our students create booklets that recorded interviews with elder family members and included pictures from home of their families. Due to my involvement with the Research Center for Educational Technology (RCET) and a mentorship project they hosted, I was awarded a $1,000.00 grant from RCET and the Jennings. I recognized that my experience with PowerPoint presentations and our ancestry projects were a perfect platform for the mentorship project. Rather than have the students produce booklets, we would help the students develop PowerPoint presentations that would replace paper and print with multi-media.

Our ancestry project focuses on the fourth grade social studies and language arts standards for the State of Ohio. In the past, students would prepare booklets that documented incidents, interviews and family history. The students had to organize their research into sections, recognizing beginning, middle and endings for their booklets. I presented the idea of using technology to enhance our ancestry projects and the two teachers with whom I team-teach were excited about the idea. While there was apprehension on their parts concerning time issues and their lack of technology skills, I reassured them that we would help each other, as well as the students, through the process.

Using the grant money provided by RCET and the Jennings Foundation, we purchased scanners, color printers, a digital camera and Intel Blue digital video cameras. The scanners and color printers were used to scan and print irreplaceable photos the students brought from home. The digital camera was used to take pictures of family members, while the video cameras were used to capture interviews with family members.

I prepared blank PowerPoint templates for the students to use in order to pre-plan, organize and arrange their work. This helped the students focus on the sequencing of their projects, keeping them organized in the midst of all the information they were gathering. Many students would have a difficult time arranging this type of presentation had they not had some boundaries within which to work.

The Results

The final results were wonderful. We invited parents, grandparents and other family members into our classrooms to view the finished PowerPoint presentations (example 1, example 2) . All involved were glad to share in this educational experience. They viewed the multi-media presentations prepared by their students. The 78 fourth graders involved in this project were proud of the work they had completed and the two teachers involved in the mentoring project remarked that they had to do this again.

Conclusion

While we had issues to deal with, in particular the teachers’ initial discomfort with the technology, those concerns were soon replaced with an attitude of being able to accomplish great things with the use of technology. Their comfort level has increased, so much so that they are willing to do this project again. We also had other teachers express an interest in learning to use the technology and replicating our project. Each of us were impressed by what the children were able to do, much more than we thought they were capable of doing.

In the future we would like to burn the presentations to disc as a memento of the school year and the work done on the ancestry projects. This will serve as a lasting memory of fourth grade.


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