PowerPoint Corruption

"Absolute power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely." Clearly not everybody likes PowerPoint. And indeed it is a somehwat overrated tool, that has found its way itnto the classrooms.

How awful it can look when compared to literature one can see when the "I have a dream"-speech by Martin Luther King is turned into a skeleton for a PowerPoint presentation. Or when Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is given the same treatment.

PROJECT GOALS:

* To watch woods fill up with snow.
* To do so without being observed.
* To steal some time from other projects.
* To stay mindful of other projects, however.

etc.

Equally bizarre is this PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address.

It requires some understanding and appreciation of literature and poetry really to feel how different the respective two versions come across. Such appreciation younger students might not have but more advanced and more mature students should be able to appreciate the (ghastly) humour.

One does, of course, not want to mutilate pieces of perfect poetry or good literature (although satirists have always done that).

How, then, can this concept be turned into a creative and humorous activity in the classroom?

Step 1: Hand out a well-known text in the students' mother tongue or just remind students of it. This could be a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm (Little Red Riding-Hood, for example), a popular song, or a longer poem for children that is part of the national heritage.

Step 2: Ask students to transform this text into a PowerPoint presentation in the target language. The content of the presentation should be as factual as possible.

Step 3: Students should both focus on preparing both a skeletal version in text form (see the Robert Frost example above) and an eloquent presentation in the target language.

This can be done in simple text form as well as in a more elaborate way if Internet access is available and students can embellish their presentations with visuals of wolves, hunters, unicorns, or whatever.

 

 

 

WHY

Another exercise to practice presentation skills. This time, however, with a more rigid language exercise: Transferring a text from L1 to L2.

Internet access or a computer with presentation software. The exercise could, hoever, also be prepared on paper.

The use of the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom is still anathema to many teachers. Mario Rinvolucri and Sheelagh Deller have, however, shown in their stimulating Using the Mother Tongue. Making the most of the learner's language (pub English Teaching professional/Delta, 2002, 96 pp, ISBN 0-954198-61-1, a review)

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Humanising Language Teaching

Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood)