Pointing in a New Direction: Microsoft Power Point

Microsoft Power Point is making it easier than ever to create multi-media presentations for more effective use in classrooms and workplaces. With a few clicks and a little creativity, you can have yourself a stunning presentation chalked full of pictures, animations, sound effects and even video, all from this one program.

There are several different templates to create an organised look, but if those aren't enough, there are still more online. These are great for those of us that are slightly less artistically gifted because they take care of all the colors and designs to make the presentation easy to read. There are also plenty of ways to animate bullet points to glide onto the screen, captivating the audience in the process. The animation of different objects on each screen can be very useful for teachers who wish to take their students through material step by step. They can show as much as they want to at one time and then add more as they go along. This quality would be extremely useful in the mathematics classroom as it would allow the teacher to walk the students through each problem and not have to worry about making mistakes copying down the problems from one step to the next.

With the 2007 version of Power Point the presenter cannot only use the inking tool in the presentation of the power point, but may also keep any inking that is made during the creation of the power point and have that in the presentation as well. This again would be handy in the mathematics classroom because it would allow the teacher to make very neat drawings of things, like graphs, ahead of time and not to have to take up class time to draw a less accurate version of it. At the same time, if the teacher did wish to draw during class, that option is still available.

There is also a way to include links to outside sources that can be accessed during the presentation. This is useful for incorporating things such as videos or other articles that would be too large to include in the actual power point.

Power Point has many good things to offer, however, when many people use it they tend to get lazy and read directly from the screen. This basically ruins everything that the snazzy applications of Power Point have been used to create. Power Point is a very useful tool, for teachers and students, but only if used correctly.