This week I spent some time in direct instruction with my students on specific PowerPoint skills (Word outlines, slide master, action buttons, and animations). Teaching these skills without a real purpose for using them would have been a waste of time.
One of the things that I have come to realize during this research project is that there must be a real purposeful reason to learn the skills and then opportunities to use them. There are other skills in PowerPoint that I don't cover - such as how to convert a slideshow to a webpage. We aren't going to be posting them online and that's not really how most people use PowerPoint - so why teach it?
I am looking back at my former scope and sequence of skills and re-evaluating some of the skills I used to teach. Yes it is nice to learn how to do a pivot table in Excel, or hanging indents in Word or automatic slide advance in PowerPoint - but if there is no real reason to learn it and use it - how can I think that the students will ever really "learn" this skill and retain the information?
Wouldn't it be better to teach them how to learn than trying to cram "everything" they should know about using a piece of software - one that will eventually change anyway?
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