2012/09/23

Summary:

Death by PowerPoint.

There are 300,000,000 PowerPoint users around the world right now. 30,000,000 PowerPoint presentations are being prepared right now. 1,000,000 PowerPoint presentations are being given right now. And half of them are terrible. Students around the world see these bad presentations, and they mistakenly think that the PowerPoint style of presentation is all there is. They learn to give PowerPoint presentations, and in turn teach future generations how to give them. The vicious cycle continues.

But there is hope.

PechaKucha is a new style of presentation where presenters are only given 20 slides and 20 seconds to present each slide. Slides progress automatically, forcing the presenter to be succinct, racing their slide deck. Sylvan Payne sees the PechaKucha 20X20 presentation style not only as a confidence-building classroom activity, but also as a necessary component of a paradigm shift away from PowerPoint. He showed Gunma JALT members his successful implementation of PechaKucha in his classes at ICU. Among the many benefits of PechaKucha Payne introduced were: It's short, so it is easy to practice. It's high-interest, because presenters have no choice but to cut out the fluff. It's doable in large classes because of its brevity. Most of all, it's fun. The meeting ended with a group discussion about the various ways Gunma JALT attendees use presentations in their classrooms.

Sylvan Payne has been doing all sorts of stuff with Academic English and content-based instruction for a really long time. He's currently teaching at International Christian University's English for Liberal Arts Program. (That's in Tokyo.)