What Technologies are Essential for Today's Classroom?

Add your thoughts to this Wallwisher.

PowerPoint and Other Presentations for Learning

I am currently reading Multi-Media Learning by Richard Mayer. This book is an excellent resource to assist with designing presentations that enhance student learning. Many of the points discussed reinforce what we know about quality teaching in terms of chunking information and providing cues to signal importance of specific information. The simplest message I take from this research is to design your classroom presentations with powerful images and limited text, but use narration to tell the story or concept. Keep the bullet points in the notes.


Debra Pickering has a presentation that provides a background lesson on the war in Afghanistan. It is an excellent example of how to use PowerPoint for teaching. If you get an opportunity to see her presentation on this, I highly recommend it.

This article provides the "Cliff Notes" version of Multi-Media Learning. Cliff Atkinson, who co-authored the article with Richard Mayer, looks at multi-media presentation from a business perspective. His business perspective can easily be translated to classroom teaching. We have limited time to present to our students and we want our limited time to have a lasting impact. Atkinson discusses the Hollywood research that has been effectively using multi-media to communicate without using bullet points. Additionally, he reiterates the need for business presenters to run through a presentation with colleagues to perfect their presentation. As educators we are great at sharing our presentation, but do we spend time together critiquing our presentation to make them better?

Let me know your thoughts.

Research with OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is an excellent resource that allows students to keep all of their notes easily organized. The days of laboriously writing out snippets of information with proper citation onto little note cards is no longer needed. Students easily create OneNote notebooks with sections and pages in place of the note cards.

The best part of OneNote is that students can capture text and images online and have an immediate citation created for the captured information.

I assisted our second through fourth grade gifted students in using OneNote as they researched information on inventors. The students needed minimal support in bouncing between the Internet and OneNote as they researched. These students were in the gifted program, but I firmly believe this tool is appropriate for all regular second through fourth grade classroom students.

The most valuable implementation lesson I learned was to start out with OneNote prior to any searching and having students create OneNote pages for each topic they intended to research. The students created a page for images, history of inventor, history of invention and interesting facts.