Power point presentation by students

Power point presentation is one of the unique ways of presenting in the class.  Unlike the yesteryear of presenting in the chart paper, I encouraged the students to use laptops. They already had the idea of creating power point including those animations, sounds effects and those different backgrounds.

fig.1.  power point on 'Pulley'

I gave them the presentation topic ‘pulley’ where they had to present how to find the mechanical advantage and velocity ratio. They also needed to explain the meaning of mechanical advantage and the velocity ratio along with calculating the efficiency of it.  Unlike the presentation on the chart papers, they were asked to download the pictures using internet. Some of them even hyperlinked the video related to pulley and explained after projecting it on the whiteboard. Instead of pointing with a stick I made them use pointer tool which appeared after the right click button.

fig. 2. power point

I observed that the students paid more interest in it as it was very different from what was taught normally in the class. The presenter used some other fun videos to grab the attention from their peers. They explained the concept, point by point and the lesson went as per the plan. They showed the pictures and videos which further made the concept clear and understandable.

Some of the disadvantages of this kind of presentation were that, they did not have hands on experience to draw the pictures as it was all downloaded and presented. They depended fully on Internets.  They focused more on animations and effects rather than on the contents.

But in general, the concept of using power point presentation help the learners with good visual aids and the ideas can be shown in many different ways to make the concept easy to understand. It provides many different ways to show our ideas such as by hyperlinking a different source, animations which can make the students boost interest in it, back ground color and sound effects which will make the presentation more attractive.