August 2000 — Features
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Creating an Interactive PowerPoint Lesson for the Classroom
It is this last characteristic that makes our lesson interactive. The student must manually advance every slide for this to work properly; that’s why each of the slides in the presentation has its own Next slide button on each slide. Otherwise, the presentation would stop dead in its tracks. We need the Kiosk feature to ensure that the student d'es not skip around the presentation. The teacher alone controls the sequence through the Action Buttons, Hidden Slides, and Kiosk Browser.
Assessment Slide
Earlier in the article, the Interactive Lesson was presented as a Mastery Learning instructional technique. An important premise with this teaching strategy is its underlying dependence on behavioral psychology. To be successful, the interactive lesson must follow a few basic rules. First, it must be logically sequenced. Significant time must be spent structuring the progression of information from beginning to end, least important to most, simple to complex. Second, there must be some form of immediate feedback. Again, this is accomplished using the hidden slides. And third, there must be a summative (final) assessment.
Summative Assessment Slide
A final slide in the presentation can meet this requirement while ensuring that students have completed the lesson, mastered all the learning objectives, and received some reward for their efforts. In a computer lab environment, this final Assessment Slide, displayed in bold colors on each individual computer monitor, alerts the teacher that the lesson has been completed and the student is ready for the next instructional challenge.
Conclusion
Interactive lessons are not new. They have existed almost since the beginning of instructional technology. But now we offer a structured format for designing such lessons using a popular, highly effective, and relatively easy-to-use software package, PowerPoint. Once created using Kemp’s Model for Designing Effective Instruction, the presentation can be captured onto a 1.44MB single floppy diskette (unless there is an inordinate number of graphic images). It can then be copied many times and provided to students who can take the lesson in a formal multimedia classroom, informal computer lab, or even on their own home computers. The interactive lesson has many practical applications for content rich subjects and is highly recommended for your next teaching with technology adventure.
