Microsoft PowerPoint

What?
Microsoft PowerPoint was the program of the week. Practically every person has seen a PowerPoint presentation at some time in their life. As students we see them sometimes all too often with some being fantastic and some being very boring. I've created PowerPoints before and so as we began to learn about PowerPoints, I wanted to learn something new and something that would make my PowerPoints more interesting and helpful. I wanted to know what makes a good PowerPoint. Less is more was probably the best tip that I learned. I now know that I don't need to put everything on the slide that I'm going to say. This helps the font to stay a good size that everybody can read and also points out the main point of discussion.
PowerPoint presentations can be everything from basic and blah to professional and fancy. The tools and manipulatives seem to be a little bit more difficult to work with for me in this program than in others because of the variety that is available. There are many things that you can do to spice up each slide such as creating different ways for your text to come onto the screen, colors and background, sound effects, adding in media and video clips, etc. You don't want it to be so extravagant that your students pay more attention to the graphics and sounds more than they pay attention to the information which is what we really want them to learn.

So What?
As a math teacher, I don't think that I will use PowerPoint as my main way of putting out information because it's not practical for solving math problems and typing in so many numbers and mathematical processes. There are other programs and ways to use media that are more useful. Although I do think that it would be a good way to mix up my teaching style from time to time in order to keep student interest and help those students that have different learning styles. Other content areas will use this program more often than math teachers do/will.
The strategies and techniques that we talked about in class are very important to keep student interest as well as helping them to get the information without being distracted. We want it to look nice but we also want to be professional and useful. I like that students can get my class notes and print them out to study and work with from my class website or email. This is helpful for students that have a hard time taking notes during class or for those that missed class altogether.

Now What?
I would like to be able to find and learn some equation editing tools and applications for programs like PowerPoint in order to be able to put math equations and processes in my presentations more quickly and easily. I will need to look for ways to integrate it into my math class and teaching style because I do think it's useful and helpful for students.