| |
But Kelvin had other questions on his mind. Like his classmates, Kelvin was
preparing his book report on PowerPoint, Microsoft's popular presentation
software, but he had jumped ahead in picking a background color for his slides:
a rich royal blue, featuring a shimmering gold key.
His teacher, John Bennetti, had started to walk through the rows of desks,
his eyebrows raised. ''Enhance it when you are done,'' Mr. Bennetti said
emphatically. ''When you are done.''
PowerPoint -- the must-have presentation software of the corporate world --
has infiltrated the schoolhouse. In the coming weeks, students from 12th grade
to, yes, kindergarten will finish science projects and polish end-of-the-year
presentations on computerized slide shows filled with colorful animation, bold
topic headings and neat rows of points, each introduced with a bullet mark.
Software designed for business people has found an audience among the spiral
notebook set.
''When you get to high school, you will need a lot of PowerPoint,'' said
Nestor Mendoza, another student in Mr. Bennetti's class, ''and in the real
world, too. This gives us time to practice.''
But just as PowerPoint has its detractors in the corporate world, some
educators are disturbed by the program's march into the classroom. They are
concerned that too many students will become fixated on fonts and formats
without actually thinking about what they are typing next to all those bullets.
Sandee Tessier, a kindergarten teacher at San Altos Elementary School in
Lemon Grove, Calif., has been using PowerPoint with her 5- and 6-year-old
students for nearly four years, integrating it into her regular reading and math
lessons.
''People come in and they have tears in their eyes because they can't believe
what these little kids are doing,'' Ms. Tessier said. ''It's part of their day,
like picking up a pencil.''
Sometimes, she said, she will take digital photographs of her pupils acting
out scenes from a book, put the photos on slides and ask the pupils to describe
their actions in words. In the process, the children create their own books.
''I train them how to get into PowerPoint, how to get into their files, over
many months,'' Ms. Tessier said. ''And then they type captions under each slide.
Their spelling isn't that great, but that's O.K.''
Ms. Tessier also encourages her pupils to write accounts of their lives and
present them in front of the class.
''It is sensational for oral language development,'' she said. ''They'll say,
'Hi, my name is Julie, and I like to eat pizza.' And there is their picture on
the screen behind them, like on a TV monitor. They are the stars of
PowerPoint.''
According to figures from Microsoft, the real star of the classroom may be
PowerPoint itself: 69 percent of teachers who use Microsoft software use
PowerPoint in their classrooms, an application second in popularity only to the
workhorse of word processing, Microsoft Word.
The software is not only a teaching aid, used by instructors as a substitute
for a chalkboard. It has become a tool for students to use as well. Suddenly
magic markers and construction paper seem so Old Economy.
Some critics contend that PowerPoint's emphasis on bullets and animated
graphics is anathema to the kind of critical thinking students should be
learning in class.
''Beware of PowerPointlessness,'' said Jamie McKenzie, the publisher of From
Now On, an online journal about educational technology.
Joan Vandervelde, a director of online professional development at the
University of Northern Iowa, said that she was offering courses this summer to
help teachers combat PowerPoint abuse.
PowerPoint's most pernicious quality, critics say, is its potential for
substituting presentation polish for thinking skills. The software is not merely
a word processor with large fonts: it can also serve as a silent guide on the
art of persuasion. Step-by-step instructions are offered by what Microsoft calls
the Autocontent Wizard, a tool that provides a template for building an
argument. The wizard never fails to offer instructions. Click to add Topic No.
1. Insert real-life examples here.
''It fosters a cookie-cutter mentality,'' said Jerry Crystal, the technology
coordinator at Carmen Arace Middle School in Bloomfield, Conn.
''PowerPoint to me is more about standardizing, rather than allowing students
to uniquely express what they got out of a lesson,'' said Colleen Cordes, a
founder of the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit group that questions the use
of computers among young schoolchildren. ''It may have a narrowing effect on
children's imagination.''
According to Microsoft, PowerPoint's introduction into the classroom was not
planned when the program was developed. But in the mid-1990's, as Windows 95
became the operating system of choice in homes and offices, Microsoft set its
sights on an arena it had not yet dominated: the K-12 school market.
Schools were already in the midst of a push to install more machines to take
advantage of the Internet, an initiative generated largely by the federal
government and technology companies. Microsoft rode the momentum to market
Microsoft Office, a suite of business programs that includes PowerPoint, as an
essential tool for education as well. The company offered software discounts,
primarily to school districts, sponsored workshops for teachers, offered free
online tutorials and handed out sample lesson plans.
The strategy worked. Among elementary and secondary schools, Microsoft Office
is the most popular software package for word processing, spreadsheets and
multimedia projects. More than 95 percent of public school districts in the
United States are using or intend to purchase Microsoft Office this year,
according to Quality Education Data, a market research company. Among individual
schools, more than 75 percent are using the product.
''Some people ask, 'Isn't Office too much?' '' said Marcia Kuszmaul, industry
relations manager in Microsoft's Education Solutions Group. ''The answer is,
Absolutely not. Students push Office. Bill Gates has said that students give the
toughest workouts to our products.''
Gina Herring, a science teacher in Glen Ridge, N.J., is an advocate of
PowerPoint, as long, she says, as it is used as a supplement to reports and oral
presentations, not as a replacement for them.
At the Ridgewood Avenue Upper Elementary School, where Ms. Herring teaches
sixth graders, she said she had seen her students develop better organizational
skills using PowerPoint.
''It allows me to check their comprehension,'' she said, ''and allows them to
show what they have learned in a creative way, in a sequenced way.''
Ms. Herring is such a proponent of the product that she held a training
session this month for fellow teachers in New Jersey. Her sixth-grade students
led some of the workshops, walking over to teachers' desks when they raised
their hands for help. Later, a student who said he did not like to talk in front
of an audience demonstrated how he had added sound to a slide show about a book
he had read. As each slide appeared, the student's voice came from the speakers,
reading rows of sentences, each starting with a bullet point.
Gary Hank, a math teacher at Lopatcong Township Elementary School in Warren
County, N.J., was one of more than two dozen teachers who crowded into the
workshop. ''The kids would go nuts over this stuff,'' he said.
But even students seem divided in their enthusiasm for PowerPoint. Back in
Union City, some of Mr. Bennetti's students were so eager to use the program
that they had it open and running before he told them to get started. Several of
them waved their hands in the air, asking questions about ''A Raisin in the
Sun'' that resulted in conversations that went far beyond the six- and
seven-word phrases they typed next to the bullets.
But a few floors below, in a computer class of eighth graders who were
presenting PowerPoint projects, the spirit was less willing.
The teacher, Anna Rubio, had asked the students to use PowerPoint to create
an electronic portfolio, describing and linking to digital projects that they
had done during the year.
One by one, students lumbered up to a computer at the front of the dimly
lighted room and opened their slides, which appeared on a screen behind them.
They did not say a word or even look at their audience, but simply clicked the
mouse button, drilling through their presentations in silence. Wild graphics,
garish colors and bold titles flashed by. Their classmates paid almost no
attention and, like bored employees stuck in a late-day board meeting, looked at
their own computer screens instead.
''I asked them if they wanted to read it or show it,'' Ms. Rubio said. ''I
guess no one wanted to read it.''
Next came the layout. He typed ''conflicts'' and it appeared, perfectly
centered and in a matching gold color, at the top of one slide. After playing
with font size (12 point? 14?), he turned to a classmate. ''How many conflicts
can we have?'' he asked, as he tested the look of two or three bullet points.
A picture caption in Circuits on May 31 with an article about the use of
Microsoft PowerPoint in schools misspelled the surname of a kindergarten pupil
shown. His mother informed The Times by e-mail this week that he is Quentin
Carranza, not Czrranza.
Related Terms: