Daily Blog - Ross Jones - September 25, 2008: BIG SCREENS IN THE CLASSROOM
I attended my son’s back-to-school night at his high school this week, and to my surprise found a front projector set up in every one of his classrooms. Granted, these were business-type projectors, not really designed or appropriate for home theater use. But even so, I was impressed on a couple of different levels.
First, at the risk of sounding ancient, I remember copying notes that my teacher wrote with chalk on a blackboard, risking eye strain, white lung disease, and the dreaded nails-on-the-chalkboard sound at 10 kHz. So purely from an educational perspective, watching a powerpoint or graphics presentation on a big screen has to enhance the learning experience.
Second, from a home theater enthusiast perspective, it’s nice to expose our youth to the benefits of watching content (even educational content!) on a huge screen, rather than a three-inch video on computer from Youtube or on their iPod. Maybe in another five or ten years, when those high schoolers start looking at setting up their own home theaters, they’ll remember those front projectors from the classroom and think, “hey, one of those will work really well at my place.”
September 29th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
As someone who has gone back to graduate school after almost a decade between graduating with a BS and entering an MS program, I have to take issue with the implied benefits of learning from a power point presentation. Maybe it’s just my old-school ways, but I personally can’t stand it when a professor lectures from power point slides. A lecture where the professor essentially re-writes his/her notes on the board while explaining them does two things in favor of learning: First, it slows the professor down, keeps him honest (e.g. in a math-based course he is forced to check his work as he goes) and forces him to only put up on the screen or discuss what he (a human with human limitations in writing speed) can actually write himself. Second, it forces the student to actually participate in the lecture by writing his/her own notes from what is said and written on the board.
A ppt slide lecture on the other hand requires very little effort on either party. Professors often put too much in their slides (more than can be discussed during an 80 minute lecture) and thus say too little about the material, leaving the student wondering which parts are important and which ones aren’t. On the student side, it’s too easy to just print out the slides ahead of time and sit passively during lecture, drifting in & out of focus, alternately paying attention to the lecturer and one’s laptop, PMP or texting device.
Ppt lectures promote laziness on the part of the teacher and the student, IMO. Granted you were talking about elementary school, not college, but it struck a nerve. Maybe some of what I’ve said might transfer over.
Maybe not.
I must say though, that the 55″ touch sensitive “smartboards” that our school has in some of its lecture rooms are REALLY cool. No chalk, no noxious ink, and the prof’s notes go straight to pdf on the course website.