The Active Class

Presenting lectures by Powerpoint (or other digital software) offers many advantages, like the ability to easily archive your lectures for future semesters, or to share your lectures with your students in advance of class, not to mention saving students’ eyesight from your messy handwriting.  But Powerpoint can have serious drawbacks when it comes to engaging your students in your class.  “Powerpoint sucks the energy out of a room,” says Diane Sieber (Faculty, University of Colorado – Boulder).  When the screen lights up, students take it as a cue to tune out.  We’ve all had this experience — we scan the slide, and while we wait for the presenter to read through their bulleted list, we daydream about what we’re having for dinner tonight.

“There’s something about the forced march through this linear structure,” says Diane, that makes students feel like there’s no risk to not paying attention.  It tends to make the instructor move faster through the material, reducing any hope that students can both follow the lecture and take notes.  “Hopefully when we get to the end of class we’ll be on the last slide,” she jokes.

Power corrupts, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely, claimed Edward Tufte, a leading critic of Powerpoint. If you want critiques of Powerpoint, there is a plethora of material on the web (such as the Gettysburg Address as created in Powerpoint, below).  But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.  Like all technology, Powerpoint is a tool.  So, how can we use it better?

http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

One of the things that Diane Sieber recommends is creating non-linear classes, which can take off in any direction that you please.  Rather than the linear structure of Powerpoint, she creates Mindmaps, which emphasize the larger concepts with a concept map and help keep students anchored in your main points.  I may blog about that more later.

Another idea is to combine the best of traditional chalk with Powerpoint, and use programs that allow you to ink up your Powerpoint interactively. This digital+interactive blend is the driver behind Smartboards and other interactive whiteboards, and with a tablet PC you can also add drawings and other annotations to slides.  I wanted to highlight one particularly  useful (free!)  tool that was designed by science education researchers, specifically for educators.    Ubiquitous Presenter is a free tool designed for use with a Tablet PC, to interactively ink slides, AND allow students to add their own ink from their seats. From their website:

UP offers the structure and detail of pre-prepared slides along with the flexibility of on-the-fly inking, leaving you free to pursue tangents, correct mistakes, and provide step-by-step in-class examples. Slide minimization and whiteboard features provide you with any extra space you need. Students can synchronize with your presentation via a web browser and watch it real-time, or remain unsynchronized and move between the slides at their leisure. All of your progressive inking is saved on the web, so students can return later and step through the lecture for review.

Writing out equations or solving problems long-hand on the slide forces the instructor to slow down (and it’s easier than creating complicated formulae in digital software), as well as archiving the handwritten material for students’ later review.  Plus, solving problems live in class reduces the tune-out factor:  There is something happening for students to follow, rather than pre-prepared bullet slides.  This approach has more flexibility, allowing the instructor to target student questions, for example.

Since students can interact with the slides themselves via a web browser, this opens a wide variety of opportunities to make lecture interactive.  One example given by the developers is to prepare a slide with empty graph axes.  During a lecture demonstration, the instructor can pause and ask students to predict — via the graph — how velocity and force will vary over time (for example).  [Students don't need a Tablet PC to do this, only a web-enabled laptop or cell phone].  The instructor can review and display these predictions, opening class discussion.   This can also be an effective means of displaying the outcome of group problem solving to the class as a whole.

Student work in UP: http://physics.csusm.edu/physics/faculty/eprice/research/UP/UP.html

This is just one way in which instructors can make use of the handy features of digital presentation, but tweak them to allow additional classroom interaction.  Stay tuned for more ideas in the future!

More information:

• About Ubiquitous Presenter (UP) (including instructor guides)
• Download UP
• Examples of UP used in physics classes
• A nice little video of UP in action
• Research on UP
• The Physics Teacher article on UP (subscription required)