Today's students have cut their teeth on technology, and they don't just enjoy it when teachers use it, they expect it! Microsoft Office Suite's PowerPoint program is an excellent resource tool that can introduce, enrich, or encapsulate the material you present in the classroom. As long as the program is not used so frequently that students are bored with it, PowerPoint is a great tool that teachers can use to reach students and "hook" them into learning without the day-to-day grind.

When beginning a new unit on Greek Myth, I love to pull out the PowerPoint to introduce my students to the Pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses as well as a wealth of monsters and fantasy creatures. It provides the perfect medium for sharing famous paintings and pictures of ancient artifacts while stirring students' interest in what they will be soon be reading. The internet is full of virtual tours and videos that can be embedded in your presentation. This gives you the opportunity develop the background of the material, teach a little history, and stimulate your students' interest in the colorful characters and rich stories that impact our language even today. Even better, PowerPoint presentations give teachers the option to provide enrichment to all students.

Many times, teachers think of enrichment as a educational aspect reserved for the best and brightest of the class. With PowerPoint, enrichment is accessible to every student, and even the slowest students will remember items from a presentation. When my sixth grade class read Jack London's "Call of the Wild", I prepared a PowerPoint that showed the rugged white terrain of the Alaskan wilderness. I included clips of The Iditarod and featured some of the famous sled teams that have participated in the grueling event. The author's words that were images in my students' minds became actual pictures depicting the kinds of scenes they had read about in London's image-rich novel. PowerPoint as enrichment is great fun for the teacher and the students!

For those classes where students need to be able to visualize and remember pertinent ideas from classroom lectures and readings, PowerPoint is a tool that is visual and auditory to reinforce material through both of those senses. My College Summit class for high school seniors needed a way to remember how to access several websites I use in the class and related materials to filling out applications for colleges and scholarships. Using a PowerPoint, I could review the ins and outs of accessing the students' materials in a way that they could remember. Even better, I could post the College Summit PowerPoint online so that my students could access it and find the particular slides that provided the material they need at any given time. This way, the material was in a format they could access at home, find what they needed with a few clicks, and use the information to work independently with my assistance but without my presence!

Again, PowerPoint is not a program to overuse in the classroom. However, it is a resource with a great range of possibilities for instruction, enrichment, and independent learning for your students. For me, it is an indispensable tool that I use in a variety of ways to increase my students' interest, learning retention, and independent learning. Get to know your way around the program, and you'll discover new uses for it while stimulating the life in your classroom!

Learn more about this author, LaDonna Hatfield.
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