PowerPoint Inquiry

I am calling Power Point Inquiry any PowerPoint presentation, or any Authoring system presentation, where the students viewing it, can interact with it on some level. Basically the students are presented with information and asked to do something with it. These include presentations meant for an entire class, or allowing students to explore a presentation on their own. This is different from the popular lecture-outline format that is beginning to be used by teachers of various subjects in schools today and are very popular with university professors (see PowerPoint Lectures).

There are many different manifestations of PowerPoint Inquiry depending on the style and creativity of the teacher and the ability level of the students. I created one that was meant to be run with a class studying the Ancient Indus River Valley. The two main objectives that I hoped to achieve were: 1) The students gain a greater understanding about Life in the Ancient Indus River Valley. 2) The Students are able to make assumptions about a Society by examining its artifacts. (Archaeology).

The First Thing I did was look for pictures of Artifacts found from the time period and locality both on the Internet and in the books that were available which I scanned in. The teacher should know what these objects are and what they tell us about the civilization. I also looked for pictures of artifacts that are similar to things we see or use today. This makes the point that there are many common links between ancient times and today. Once I had a decent amount of pictures, I put them on PowerPoint slides in an order that put similar objects together or on back to back slides.

When doing this I found that using a blank format was the best for what I wanted to do. I then inserted pictures on the slide and stretched them to the size that I wanted by clicking on them then dragging the borders out. Of course depending on the presentation other formats may prove easier.

Since some of the pictures are fairly obvious I assumed that when the slide came up the teacher could just say what they are and then ask what the item tells us about the people who made it. Certain artifacts however were not immediately apparent and those I noted on the slide with a Question along the lines of "what is this?" For these, students were supposed to guess what they thought it was and why they thought so on a worksheet. Then the teacher would go around and allow the students to guess, hopefully eventually coming to the correct answer. Then for some pictures I inserted a picture of a modern day equivalent of the mystery item. The PowerPoint Presentation's notes cannot be seen here but if you download the presentation you can see them there. Please take a look at my Indus Valley Presentation.

Other examples might be presentations like the one I created on Octavian's rise to power. In this type of "choose your own adventure" format students are able to explore the information on their own based on what you create.

Although neither of my examples include sound or video files they are great additions to any type Inquiry presentations.

Think about how you have used pictures, sounds, simulations, or activities that can be enhanced in some way through the use of an authoring system. See if you can create a worthwhile Inquiry project from them. Never create, or at least use, a presentation that you feel can be done more thoroughly without the use of an authoring system.