Presentation Programs for Teaching and Learning

I have enjoyed learning about how presentation programs, such as Microsoft PowerPoint can be utilized in a classroom as a digital support material for my lessons. I really like how inclusive they are! PowerPoint can include videos, graphics, animations, audio, text, and links. PowerPoint also has the capability to collect all of your external files that are in the presentation and package them.

I also found the seven different intelligences very interesting, including linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. It is pretty amazing how simple presentation programs that were originally intended for the business world allow teachers to reach students with multiple learning styles and disabilities!

I recently participated in an Academic Boot camp for the school that I will begin teaching at in the Fall. The purpose of this was to engage students, give them a sense of what YPA will be like (because it is a new charter school), as well as give them the opportunity to have fun and become familiar with teachers and students. I taught a mini, fun art lesson to a group of middle school students. I created a PowerPoint Presentation to introduce the lesson on the figurative artist, Amedeo Modigliani, who is primarily known for his modern portrait paintings characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form. I included the artist’s name, photograph, brief bio, and a description of his work. I also included images of his two most prominent works with titles and dates to allow the students to visually see the characteristics of his work. I also included a brief description of our activity, creating Modigliani-like self-portraits! I also included images of 2 student works that I found online for a similar study and a 3-step diagram of how we were going to divide our paper to create the outline of our elongated self-portrait.

I am most proud of the 3-step diagram. I am so glad that I included this, as the students referred back to it quite often as they were drawing the elongated self portrait, to ensure their drawing proportions were like that of Modigliani. The students also loved the images on the presentation. They thought the elongated forms were hilarious, and they were intrigued that Modigliani’s portraits did not include characteristics of the eyes; most were simply shaded, creating the mysterious mask effect.

If I could create the presentation again, I would include audio elements and more information and images relating to art history. Because this was a mini lesson, and I only had the students for a very short period of time, I had to quickly introduce the lesson and let them begin their self-portrait.