The Point of PowerPoint in SophLit
2. Content of Presentations
Our principle for selecting
images and text
was to anticipate the students' needs as readers. What
places,
persons, or themes could we introduce that would prepare them
for
the reading? What images, for example, would save them from
confusion or
help them see more vividly with their mind's eye
as they read?
For Major British Writers I (English 221), we tested PowerPoint presentations on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Canterbury Tales, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, King Lear, John Donne, and Paradise Lost. Most contained a picture of the author and of a locale that would give context. To introduce John Donne, for example, it made sense to show the interior of St. Paul's in London, where he ministered for so many years.
We also used images for scenes or objects hard to visualize, such as these scenes of the hunts in Gawain. Some images showed things that most students might visualize but not very well. To introduce Milton's Paradise Lost, our student assistant provided not only heavenly images (angels, etc.) to choose from but also different types of fruit and snakes!
For Major British Writers II (English 222), presentations covered Wollstonecraft, Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, World War I poets, and Lessing. Images ranged from Blake's sketches from Songs of Innocence and Experience to Choctau Indians featured in Carlyle's Past and Present to the fields of war-ravaged Europe for the war poets.
We wanted the students to remember what they had seen; too much text would distract from the image, and we feared that students would feel the need to copy the text into their notes rather than focus on the image. Based on attention-span problems in our fall 1997 PPT classes, we chose in 1998 to make the PPT shows shorter and to truncate the annotation whenever possible. Each PPT presentation was brief--from 5 to 15 slides--and emphasized image rather than text.
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