I think today’s class was one of the most enjoyable classes I’ve sat in all semester. We started with a bit of a summary of what we did with Rich two weeks ago where we talked about ways to incorporate multimedia into our teachings to potentially make them more engaging. An example was finding a balance between pictures and words for a slide. Michael started to explain how to properly use a bicycle pump. The first method he used was a boring looking paragraph that step for step explained how to use the pump. No pictures were included, just words. That was not very effective. He then showed a picture of just a bicycle pump that was still in the packaging and that wasn’t great either because it was not engaging. The final attempt included a step by step diagram of a pump in action with descriptive text on the diagram. I found this to be a perfect and informative balance between text and picture. It was easy to follow the different steps of the pump but also I wasn’t overwhelmed with words. This part of the class was incredibly relatable as a university student. I have sat through classes where we just sit there and listen to the professor read off of a word document that only features words. It is by far the least engaging way to teach a class. We then moved on to see the power of PowerPoint and how it can be more than just a presentation tool.

We played around with the different tools and I had a lot of fun with it. I can totally see how kids would be able to use this. An example I thought about was students making a story and including themselves in it. They could easily grab backdrops off of the internet and post them into a PowerPoint all well including different pictures as the characters or the main focus. I think this might be too advanced for younger students but for students in grade 7 or 8 they would be able to figure this out. It is also very easy to teach. Michael showed us how to do it on the projector and I figured it out rather quickly.

The potential for easily making worksheets is there too. Some of our classmates took a more serious route and developed incredibly easy math worksheets using a few images. This is pretty cool to me as I won’t have to always rely on borrowing other teacher resources but I can just hop on to power point and quickly make a worksheet.