Post #7

I feel that the biggest advantages of using presentation software in the k-12 classroom are convenience, aesthetics, and versatility, among others. It is much more conventient, for example, to download a Power Point and present it to a class than to spend time structuring a lecture and printing out diagrams/hand outs. It's also a lot more entertaining for the student to watch a presentation or participate in a game via a presentation than to sit and take notes for forty five minutes at a time. Mostly, I believe the versatility of presentation software is its biggest advantage; put at Power Point on a flash drive and you can use it virtually anywhere that has a computer. I only see one disadvantage: impersonality. Presentations shown on big pull-down screens may be more visually pleasing but they lack the explicit interaction between teacher and student that comes along with old fashioned lectures.