Avoiding “Death by PowerPoint”: Using PowerPoint Custom Animations and Graphics to Enliven the Earth Science Classroom

Love it or hate it: Microsoft PowerPoint is quickly becoming the lecture format of choice, replacing the traditional chalkboard, overheads, and slide sets. Although educators have adopted the new technology, many have done little to also adapt their lecturing style to the new medium. At best, old scanned slides now appear with new, colorful labels written in fancy fonts or, at worst, students are “PowerPointed-to-death” by too much information and the ever-varying, distracting “custom animated” fly-in text bullet. Indeed, built-in presentation templates provided by PowerPoint create nightmarish bullet-dominated text slides that are more effective in overwhelming student's note-taking abilities than to stimulate learning. Not surprisingly, PowerPoint has earned vocal critics in the education community and among students.

The alternative approach presented here demonstrates how PowerPoint custom animations can be used effectively in replacing the old text and bullet format and move learning from monotonous text and line-drawings to a visually interesting and captivating experience. PowerPoint provides the means to replace text bullets, boring diagrams, and sleepy graphs with real-time, two- or three-dimensional custom animations. This allows for animated visual demonstration of earth science concepts that are otherwise difficult to describe verbally. In addition, it removes the need for loading external animation clips that disrupt the flow of the presentation and often create cross-platform incompatibilities and require additional software. Animations also provide a means to interject humorous “interludes” and thus capture the attention of the students and relax the teaching atmosphere. Examples covered are taken from introductory and upper-level courses in geology, paleontology, and atmospheric sciences.