The power of the point

or 'What's the point of powerpoint?'

I’m not knocking it! I’ve done hundreds of presentations for teachers and hundreds of language classes for students where I’ve used powerpoint slides to back up or reinforce what I was saying. It’s a great tool of course!

And in fact, the main reason why we started using Zoom back in 2015 for our Hands up online storytelling sessions was because, unlike with Skype, you can share powerpoint slides of pictures from a story, at the same time as sharing your webcam of you telling the story (see below for example)

At the time I just thought that was an amazing feature. But these days I very rarely use powerpoint in zoom sessions and almost never in sessions with kids. I don’t use it because I think that one of the main things we’re trying to do in Hands up sessions is make as strong a connection as possible - and we can’t establish much of a connection if our webcam is just shown as a tiny video in the corner. They can’t see me and I can’t really see them, so therefore they might as well just look at the picture in their regular classes.

The screenshot at the top in contrast, is from a session I was doing this morning with 50 boys in a grade 8 government school class In Gaza. They have been doing a unit in ‘English for Palestine’ called ‘Friends’ I’m modelling a follow up activity that I wanted them to do themselves which is talking about someone close to them. I’m talking about my mum and more specifically about the time 27 years ago when she came to visit me in Brazil, and to meet her first born grandson, my son Andre.

You can see in the faces of Fuad and Mohammad (the two boys who’ve come to the front to talk to me) and in my face too that we’re all engaged in this activity. You can also feel this it when the students themselves do it in the screenshots below. It’s simple, it’s natural, it’s lo-tech, it’s personalised - and therefore motivating, and above all, it’s meaningful to everyone. I just don’t think it would have worked so well had we all done it through Powerpoint. What do you think?

Ahmed talkimg about his dad

Another Ahmed talking about his Grandad