August 2000 — Features
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Creating an Interactive PowerPoint Lesson for the Classroom
Duquesne University’s School of Education graduate students are learning to use available classroom technologies to teach. The curriculum for the Program in Instructional Technology integrates the tools that most schools provide in their own computer labs and classrooms. If students use technology to learn, teachers should use the same technology to teach.
The foundation for much of the technology being used in today’s classrooms is the Microsoft Office suite. It is fast becoming the integrated software package of choice for many schools and school districts. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access are the staples of many students and teachers. Complementing these tools, Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator are the tools of choice for accessing the Web. Why not help teachers utilize these same tools to develop text, visual, and Web-based materials for the classroom, and leave the more complex and costly packages to multimedia designers and commercial artists? The success of this philosophy has been borne out by a blistering growth in applications from K-12 classroom teachers, technology coordinators, and corporate trainers to join Duquesne’s cohort.
Interactive Lesson Defined
Students in the Program use Microsoft Word to create text-based class handouts, lesson study guides and student workbooks based on their own classroom learning objectives. They use Microsoft Front Page and Netscape Composer to produce online Web-based Virtual Tours. And they use Microsoft’s PowerPoint to create an “Interactive Lesson.” Interactive lessons take the form of self-paced, student-controlled, individualized learning opportunities embedded with assessment events along the way. In practice, these lessons are offered to students who need individualized instruction, corrective instruction, additional practice, or topical enrichment activities. Specifically, an interactive lesson:
• Is a visually-based, behavior-oriented teaching strategy appropriate for learners of all ages who benefit from the concrete learning experiences that graphic presentations offer.
• Contains self-paced instructional content appropriate for students who learn best when instructed at their own pace, or who need the benefits provided by remedial instruction outside the classroom.
• Offers specific, logical, systematic lessons that foster individualized instruction and sequential learning.
• Is student-initiated and student-controlled learning that places a good deal of the responsibility for mastering the material directly in the hands of the learner.
• Embraces all phases of the Mastery Learning instructional technique. It suggests alternatives for presenting the initial mastery objectives, corrective instruction, and enrichment activities.
