In my teaching practice I have been rapidly moving away from PowerPoint presentations as a way for students to engage with content for various reasons, and a recent twitter post by Oliver Caviglioli (@olicav) articulated one of those reasons in a succinct way.
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| Oliver Caviglioli's twitter post |
The essence of the post is that meaning is more clearly conveyed with a sentence than a slide of bullet points. Oliver's reference was related to presenting to an audience, but there are some clear links to the way that we present information to students which I am going to explore in this blog post.
Take for example the following set of slides on forces which would be delivered as part of the same lesson.
Ignore the issues these slides have with their design (which is distracting) and that some of the information is incorrect (forces are also acting when things are not moving, or not changing their shape, speed, or motion). Instead focus on the content that they are trying to convey.
If we assume that when the writer of these slides refers to a force, they mean a net unbalanced force, then through these slides students are presented with the following fragmented information:
- When things move a net unbalanced force has acted.
- A net unbalanced force can change an object's shape, speed and direction.
If we were to present this same information in a single sentence we could write:
When a net unbalanced force acts on an object it will change the object's shape, speed or direction.
Our fragmented information has been consolidated into one sentence. Importantly, we have linked different ideas together and conveyed meaning* through the sentence with words such as "when", "acts" "will change". Then as a teacher we can (as Oliver Caviglioli suggests) step aside, talk, and ask and answer questions. In a science lesson this sentence could be accompanied by some demonstrations of net unbalanced forces in action, and potentially 'dual coding' the sentence using an input-output diagram.
We could take this even further and put multiple sentences together into short paragraphs, and give students notes rather than copy slides of bullet points, as I have blogged about here.
I hope you find this blog post useful!
*If you want to think more about conveying meaning through sentences and diagrams (and knowledge schema) I found "How To Organise Ideas Using Dual Coding" By Oliver Caviglioli and Seneca very useful.
