I got an education yesterday…about the fourth grade.
The granddaughter of a friend spotted my Tablet PC. She wanted to try it out. So I showed her Journal, ArtRage, and MathPractice. She loved ’em.
As a member of the generation that uses Google as a verb she had no problem blasting through the programs–although I had to show her little things like it was OK to lay her hand on the display and write normally (although maybe with the pen a little more vertical than she might otherwise), not hold the pen too long on the display or else it would trigger the right mouse button event, and the like.
She was definitely computer savvy. So I asked her how she used computers at home and school and what she liked and didn’t like about them.
I remember the fourth grade as the time when I realized I didn’t know how to spell “giraffe.” Sounds like to me she’s going to remember the fourth grade as the year of discovering Google, copy/paste and PowerPoint.
How she uses PowerPoint tells it all. First, she Googles to find things on the Net–let’s say on native American houses–then pastes pictures she finds, writes a few snippets, and then tweaks and re-tweaks the fonts and font sizes.
I wondered, why are they using PowerPoint anyway? Are they giving class presentations? If so, how? With projectors? On a large screen TV? Or are they just submitting their work?
She never got around to telling me how they present their PowerPoint slides, but she was quite familiar with the process of creating the slides.
A couple key points I gleaned:
* Finding good information fast is critical to her and Google is her tool of choice. She’s learned that there’s an art in the query.
* She’s trying to get to a “finished” presentation-quality result as quickly and easily as possible.
I understand why she uses Google. But why PowerPoint? Yeah, I’m sure the teacher told her too, but I think it’s because of all the Office products it gives her the nicest looking output the fastest with the greatest amount of flexibility. Pictures, text, sound, movies, animations, sequences, etc are all fairly manageable to do in a short amount of time. Word is way too restrictive in layout. OneNote does presentation poorly (although outlining text is passable). And alternatives like Publisher are document oriented. She’s not authoring an article to be printed. She’s sharing a story–an interactive dialog. So how about Flash? Way too complicated. PowerPoint wins.
One other PowerPoint tidbit: She does her PowerPoint work at school–on a Mac and home machine (a Windows-based machine) doesn’t have a copy.
And lastly I realized, PowerPoint is a great equalizer in giving presentations. Everyone has the same no-cost, sweat-equity access to great looking slide shows. I bet though that there’s a more appropriate app to be written that can challenge PowerPoint like OneNote has challenged Word.
Excellent article Loren and a subject dear to me to- PCs in education. My kids started with PowerPoint for school projects a few years ago and I asked one of their teachers why they promote PowerPoint for the kids. She gave me 3 reasons that make perfect sense:
1. Almost everybody has PowerPoint.
2. It is (as you point out) relatively easy for kids to assemble their varied information for the project.
3. Consistency of output. She indicated that having the kids use PowerPoint constrains the finished product so that all the kids have a consistent project which makes it easier to grade. She indicated she can also tell how much effort they put into doing the project.
I found this reasoning quite interesting and telling about how kids can get preconditioned in their computing habits.
Yep. Kim (10yrs & 5th grade) has been using PowerPoint for the last couple of years in school too. She says about computers, “If it doesn’t have PowerPoint, then I don’t want it.”
Interestingly, her Google image search skills are well honed (perhaps more than her keyword search). When she did her Martha Washington report this fall she was able to get images of historical documents, portraits of our first First Lady and many other things within minutes — and of course, move them all into PowerPoint.