1. By careful mixing media, a presentation can appeal to a number of different learning styles (i.e. visual learners, auditory learners, etc.) and be made more stimulating.
2. The templates provided have been designed to default to good presentation criteria. Using the styles of the default templates can significantly improve the clarity and structuring of a presentation. This helps to avoid the common use of excessive text often found on overhead transparencies. Even as a tool to create better-designed black and white or color transparencies, PowerPoint enforces simple but important rules of highly effective media design in the point sizes of text, bullets, framing, and layout.
3. Clipart samples in PowerPoint can be used to illustrate any number of things. For example, in a Geography course clipart can be used to illustrate the flags, crests, maps, currencies, and landmarks of a country or region.
4. Because many students, particularly in elementary school, have not traveled outside of the United States, a "virtual tour" of countries featuring photographs of people and places in the country in question, accompanied by a loop of national music, can help students relate to a place they have never been.
5. Photographs from Microsoft Bookshelf, the World Wide Web, and other sources can be used to illustrate slides. Short video clips from CNN could be inserted to add variety and a dynamic quality to presentations.
6. Although PowerPoint can be used effectively without photos, clipart, or charts of any kind, the real attraction of the software is the seamless integration of text and visual elements.
7. PowerPoint is ideal for teaching with the case study method, beginning with the "facts of the case" and then turning to the questions and discussion.
8. Quizzes and tests can be presented as a PowerPoint presentation, and ask essay, fill-in, or multiple-choice questions, reducing photocopying costs. Many students have found quizzes on a TV monitor to be more legible in many cases than black and white overhead transparency quizzes.
9. A PowerPoint quiz can test students' recognition of leaders, flags, and maps; such a quiz may involve an essay reacting to a chart, graph, or photograph, moving students beyond the goal of grasping secondary knowledge and toward reacting to and interpreting primary data.
10. PowerPoint’s electronic file format allows distribution and modification for/by students unable to be present or who have impaired visual or auditory difficulties.
11. Editing of each PowerPoint file is very easy with minimal associated reprinting costs. This ease and potential immediacy of revision facilitates reflection upon, and evolution of, teaching materials by staff whilst minimizing the consequences of any revision in terms of either workload or time.
12. The portability of the files allows presentations to be given wherever the technology is available or distributed where appropriate. Presentations can also be set up to run automatically if required e.g. as demonstrations/instructions within a laboratory
13. PowerPoint slides and presentations can be easily reproduced in the form of handout sheets with the bullet points clearly printed out. This allows students more time to focus on class lecture and discussion, rather than rapidly taking notes. These sheets can also be photocopied as a course pack by a local vendor and available to students at the beginning of the semester.
14. Extra information can be ‘hidden’ within files for answering predicted questions or for providing feedback to students using the file in a distance-learning context.
References:
www.technologysource.org/article/use_of_powerpoint_in_teaching_comparative_politics
