Kids PowerPoints

My little brother, of eight years old, was tasked with doing a presentation about someone in his family, and he chose me. It was heart-warming that he chose me, though he may have found more interesting answers from someone else, like my mother or father. He did an interview with me, asking ten questions about myself, my childhood, and my family. Though we have over twelve years between us, he’s doing it the same way I did my presentations: with PowerPoint slides.

It brought to mind a piece I read called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. It’s thesis is that the format of PowerPoint has an innate impact on the quality of presented information, with it’s hierarchical dot points, linear progression, and constraints on text size. It had a case study on a NASA aerospace incident, where key information about a severe technical fault was obscured by the presentation format, and failed to reach executives up the hierarchy. Arguably, this is more a problem with the hierarchy of communication of the organisation, but it’s probable that communicating by PowerPoint was a factor.

The rubric for my brothers presentation was only partly about content. Mostly, it is about how well organised the information is, engagement with the audience, and speaking in a clear voice. These are crucial skills! Of course, the child is less aware that this is what they should focus on, nor do they care, which is natural and expected. With PowerPoint in front of them, they tend to focus on inconsequential aspects, like template choice, fonts, colours, and which pictures to use; the focus of their presentation is directed in the wrong way due to the medium they are using. I know that I had this tendency, and many of my peers in primary school did as well.

In a slideshow, the child can fall onto showing things in the slides and reading whatever they wrote in the slide. They will usually be turned to the board, speaking away from the audience, shying away from them if they are nervous rather than confronting the audience. If they want to speak to the audience, they must turn back and forth between them and the slides. Their attention is divided and weakened in both directions. It is probable that the choice of medium sets them up for failure in this way, and the child is less likely to get any benefit in their public speaking with this activity.

This could be alleviated by having the presenting student, if they use PowerPoint, to be instructed to not put text in the slides, only supporting images. They should be shown how to prepare cue cards, or maybe a script for the ones who are more anxious about public speaking. This way, they can face the audience, speaking directly to them with full attention, and they also receive the attention of the audience better; children do become bored by a distracted presenter, which is reasonable behaviour even from an adult.

An argument in favour of this is that PowerPoint is a ‘key digital literacy skill’ that students must have. Students already learn office programs in their ICT classes. While it might encourage ‘digital literacy’, it somewhat impedes the actual goal of developing the presentation skills of the student, which is the express aim by the assignment rubric. Digital literacy should be focused on in high school anyway, where the majority of work is done on the computer. Primary school should impart the most essential skills, as a student’s high school education could be cut short for various reasons. Clear communication trumps digital literacy in most aspects of life, even in most workplaces. Digital literacy for most people only holds importance in office work or running a small business. There is considerable talk that young people are lacking in communication skills; this is one of the largest complaints of businesses that hire graduates. Digital literacy is also a complaint, though less frequent (and not that we have poor digital literacy despite my generation having used office suite since second grade… what good that did for us!). If you need, you could teach an adult to use PowerPoint in an hour or so, but you will struggle to teach them how to improve their communication. Thus, the argument of ‘digital literacy’ is weak and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

In fine, I think it would be better for students to make presentations without PowerPoint as an aid. It would be more difficult, but there is a more valuable experience in it. This is merely my opinion; I work as a teaching assistant at RMIT, but am not educated in teaching, I’m just a guy with some interest in pedagogy. Nonetheless, I don’t think this bars me from having an opinion or from making comment.