The Bureau

I've spent a fair portion of the past week observing classes in the schools where the materials I'll be editing will be used. The schools are extremely swish looking, but the classroom materials they use (PowerPoint presentations) are clunky and don't match with the online course the students follow at home and in the language labs.


'Check in' area

The classes have some interesting dynamics, which need to be addressed in the design of the materials. For a start, classes are no bigger than four, and sometimes just have one participant, so no large group exercises (traditional textbook fodder) can be used. The classrooms themselves are also pretty small, so students can't easily break off into pairs. Instead, their focus is on the computer screen, which creates another problem, as the teachers come to rely heavily on the PowerPoint presentations and are reluctant to step away from them and do board work or organise the students to do speaking activities independent of the content on the slides.


Reception and classrooms in background.

So I've been trying to work out ways of getting round the physical limits of the classroom and providing direction in the teachers' materials to encourage teachers to break away from the tyranny of the PowerPoint presentation; an interesting change from working within the more predictable framework of the textbook.

Additionally, I've been put in charge of writing a guideline on PowerPoint style for our writers, and have been nosing around in the theory of 'thirds'; something I'd understood intuitively but never seen written about before.


Image taken from Presentation Zen

Certain of my comrades are deeply suspicious of PowerPoint, but I'm rather fond of it. There's something deeply satisfying about creating a good presentation, and it works surprisingly well with language teaching, on both a macro and micro level (and yes, I'm sure Keynote works much better, but I'm not allowed to use it, so Microsoft it must be). Whether you are animating down to the syllable level, or creating an overarching theme that runs through the entire lesson, the ability to take the idea and create the outcome almost instantaneously is a blessed relief when one is used to waiting for months for books to arrive on ships from Hong Kong.