Teaching with powerpoint

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but after reading this blog post by a CS student who prefers her teacher’s illegible chalkboard rants to powerpoint, it made me think about my own experiences teaching with and without it. In the beginning of my course, I opted against using it. I found it a bit unnatural, because the class I teach is two hours long and not recurring. So I feel like in the time we have in-person, it’s a critical opportunity to tie things together and also to get as much interaction from students as possible.

I think if nothing else, it really depends on the individuals you’re working with and that changes each term. I’ve started using Powerpoint, but mostly to help me, rather than my audience and it’s worked well to this point. I’ve found also, that working in tandem with other online tools and healthy use of the web to drive home particular messages.

So I’m going to continue with it the rest of the term. I think it really does depend on the professor and their teaching style, to determine whether Powerpoint works well or not. I’ve pretty much lost all ability to write on a whiteboard, it seems, as typing and just not writing much anymore has eroded my handwriting. I might work on this.