Value of PowerPoint

What then is gained by the teacher’s use of PowerPoint presentation in the classroom? Undoubtedly, the fact that the PowerPoint slideshow is popular amongst teachers suggests that teachers must have found it useful and therefore there is a high adoption in its use across subjects and school levels. The use of presentation slides has a number of affordances. In addition to the teacher’s talk, the slideshow allows for the visualisation of knowledge multimodally, through language, images, animation, and sound. This can facilitate the students’ learning of the ideational content and comprehension of specific concepts. As such, the affordance of the semiotic technology of PowerPoint presentation is that it supports the collective and multimodal visualisation of knowledge.

The use of PowerPoint presentation also allows for a clear structuring and sequencing of the subject knowledge to be communicated. It serves to organise and order the stages of the lesson, such as signalling the time in the lesson for group work, class discussion, and check-out activities. Multimedia, such as video clips, can be embedded and played seamlessly, through the PowerPoint presentation.These contribute to the organisation in the logogenesis, or logical unfolding of the lesson, and support the teachers by serving as an aide memoire such that all points prepared during the lesson planning are delivered to the students. In this light, the affordance of the semiotic technology of PowerPoint presentation is that it provides for a logical sequencing of knowledge and explicit ordering of lesson stages.

Related to this affordance of the PowerPoint semiotic technology is that it ensures a certain baseline and a consistency in the content, at least on the slides, delivered by different teachers using the same deck of slides. From an administrator’s perspective, this affordance presents a systemic value in evening out the disparities in teaching, to some extent. The learning experience of the students will no doubt ultimately differ based on how the teachers use the other semiotic modes to express their pedagogy. However, there may be assurance to the administrators, and perhaps parents, that the same teaching resources with a generally consistent set of content are used across teachers teaching the same level of students. In other words, the affordance of the semiotic technology of PowerPoint presentation is that it allows the ease of replicability of teaching resources and potential dissemination of quality teaching content.

Cost in PowerPoint

What then is the opportunity cost in the semiotic technology of PowerPoint presentation? In a word, what is lost is flexibility. The teacher may be less responsive to the developments in the lesson such as answering questions from students to clarify specific ideas. In responding to students’ questions, the teacher would tend to reply using only speech, especially if the screen obstructs the easy access to and use of the whiteboard. Discussion of students’ questions that may divert to different learning pathways and knowledge trajectories are also not as easily accommodated when the teacher is constrained by the fixed content and preset learning sequence in the PowerPoint presentation. As such, the use of the PowerPoint presentation as a semiotic technology necessarily involves a certain surrender of teacher’s agency in the classroom, inhibiting the teacher’s spontaneous responses to the students’ questions, in-class discussion and unplanned lesson developments.

The use of PowerPoint presentation also tends to privilege a particular way of teaching and learning, where there is a focus on the accuracy and comprehensiveness in the transmission of canonical knowledge and ideas, represented through the fairly immutable content of the slides during the lesson. With the use of PowerPoint semiotic technology, the teacher tends to rely on the presentation slides in the lesson and often ends up presenting knowledge to students, almost to the extent of‘selling the content’ rather than facilitating a more inquiry-based approach to learning. This has implications on the nature of teaching and learning realised in the lesson. In particular, the pedagogic relations enacted between the teacher and students through the use of the semiotic technology in PowerPoint presentations is one that is authoritative, teacher-centred, and socially distant.