Clicking early with PowerPoint
Across the Bay State, grade-schoolers gain a high-tech advantage
Shuttling between the Internet and his computer slide show, Manuel Duarte put the finishing touches on his research project. He outlined his main findings in bullet points, and dragged images and audio files from the Web to liven things up.
Duarte wasn’t polishing his PowerPoint presentation for a boardroom sales pitch; it was for his fourth-grade class in Brockton.
PowerPoint — once the staple of business conferences and corporate meetings — is lending a high-tech edge to grade-school classrooms across the state. The days of construction paper and poster board projects have been replaced by computer-generated images and laser pointers.
The use of the popular Microsoft slide-show program often starts as early as second grade, and can be found in urban school systems such as Brockton and Boston as well as suburban districts.
It’s a natural progression in an increasingly digital world, teachers and technology specialists say, given that an increasing number of schools are installing wireless Internet access and integrating technology into daily lessons. It may surprise older generations raised on chalkboards and cursive, but PowerPoint’s presence strikes today’s students as ‘‘NBD,’’ ‘‘No Big Deal’’ in text-message shorthand.
‘‘When I first saw kids this age doing this, honestly, I was flabbergasted,’’ said Kathleen Moran, principal at Huntington Elementary School in Brockton. ‘‘But for them, it’s second nature.’’
PowerPoint is a near-universal software program for slide show presentations that are usually shown on projection screens. Slides typically include text, art, graphs, and audio clips. Students usually present their completed PowerPoint projects in front of the class, clicking through the slides as they talk about their findings in more detail. That helps teach the largely lost art of public speaking, teachers say.
‘‘You have to decide how to draw your audience in, and what you want them to come away knowing,’’ said Ann Marie Dlott, technology specialist for the Shrewsbury elementary schools. ‘‘That’s a skill in itself.’’
Shrewsbury fourth-graders have even presented PowerPoint projects to the School Committee as an example of what they are learning. That’s another benefit of the format, teachers say: it can be easily distributed among students, teachers, and parents.
Nationally, a survey of 185,000 students taken last fall indicated that the most frequent Internet use is for research, followed closely by creating slide show presentations.
The survey, conducted by NetDay, a national education technology group, also suggested that nearly half of the students in grades 6 through 12 feel positively about the value of online learning, and that students are more active learners when assigned multimedia projects.
‘‘Because they are so technologically literate, they produce better work,’’ said Lawrence Gray, administrator of educational technology for the Stoughton schools.
The projects allow students to play to their academic strengths, giving students who learn better visually a better chance to shine, Gray added. ‘‘We all learn differently. Some of us get a lot from lectures, some of us don’t get anything. Some of us learn best visually.’’
That seemed true in the Brockton fourth-grade class room where Duarte and his friends were hard at work on their assignments, pulling together profiles of animals that live in rain forests. Students surfed the Web to research their animal’s appearance, habits, and behavior, then wrote up their findings in bullet points for the PowerPoint slide transparencies, occasionally asking their teacher’s help with finding facts or words they didn’t know. They watched clips of their animal in the wild, delighting in the sights and sounds, and chose the best ones to perk up their presentations.
Teachers say the PowerPoint presentations are superior to the old-fashioned report in many ways. The assignments help students learn to synthesize large amounts of information into a clear, concise format; bring people, places, and ideas to life with pictures and sounds; and spark students’ interest and creativity.
‘‘You can express yourself a little more rather than just putting something in a folder,’’ said Kenneth Cisneros the technology coordinator in Cohasset.
The presentation’s graphic components reinforce concepts better than the written word alone, many educators say.
‘‘In an encyclopedia, you can see a still picture of a volcano,’’ Moran said. ‘‘But online you can see and hear it erupting. It’s so much more real and exciting. It really grabs their attention.’’
Across the room, Duarte’s keen devotion to his armadillo project helps prove her point. ‘‘I’m gonna put a picture of an armadillo jumping and the sound of a rain forest,’’ he said, adding admiringly that he liked ‘‘how armadillos roll to protect themselves.’’
The main risk involved in PowerPoint projects, teachers say, is allowing students to oversimplify the material and learn just enough to slap together a few points. While some students will concentrate more on flashy presentations than solid research, teachers say they make sure to grade more on substance than style.
‘‘It can be hard,’’ conceded Cassandra O’Brien, a teacher at Deer Hill School in Cohasset, where her fourth-graders recently presented PowerPoint reports on the phases of the moon. ‘‘It’s funny, some of them really do look like business presentations.’’
Michael Purdy, technology integration specialist for Plymouth schools, where grade-schoolers adeptly adjust charts and insert text boxes, said the presentations can’t replace sophisticated research, but can serve as a nice primer for beginners.
‘‘I wouldn’t want my AP [Advanced Placement] student necessarily doing PowerPoint,’’ he said. ‘‘But for younger students, it’s going to spark their interest and allow their creative side to come through.’’
In Brockton, Faustino Fernandes has learned that lemurs eat leaves and fruits and live in Madagascar. That’s an island next to Africa, he explained patiently.
‘‘I went on Google and got the pictures and the sounds,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s fun. You get to look at pictures and listen to stuff.’’
Nearby, Isa Mendes, 9, was a bit stumped and went to her teacher, Sandra Earley, for help. They looked online for information on capuchin monkeys.
‘‘Let’s see what we can find out about them,’’ Earley said. ‘‘They eat snails. Yum. Let’s have some snails.’’ Mendes giggled and shifted her feet. Eventually, they hit the jackpot — pulseplanet.com, which had loads of information.
‘‘It’s fun, and you can learn a lot,’’ Mendes said.
Given technology’s breakneck pace, it won’t be long until PowerPoint is yesterday’s news, some teachers say.
Fourth-graders at Spring Street School in Shrewsbury posted their projects on the Lewis and Clark expedition on the Web via downloadable podcasts, and visitors can leave their comments on a blog.
‘‘It’s a whole new world,’’ said Dlott.
Peter Schworm can be reached at schworm@globe.com. 