PowerPoint gets a lot of grief. We suffer from ‘death by PowerPoint’ to the extent that the mere sight of it in classrooms prompts the assumption that something unsuitable and unchallenging will be going on. There is a rush to espouse alternatives.

I don’t intend to mount a defence of a piece of software because it is just that, a piece of software. Of itself it’s neither good nor bad; it stands or falls by the way it is used. 

At worst I imagine that there are school servers full of presentations that are just a listing of facts; or am I too gloomy?

So what’s to be done? I’m going to suggest a few things that might help rehabilitate this unfortunate piece of software. Before the cries of, “You can do that with ****” begin I know that but I’ll make two points. First, it’s not about the software, it’s about using ICT to find a suitable solution to a task. Second it’s something that many people are comfortable with so why not get some positives from that rather than making it appear that there is something inferior about it?

So here we go. To state the blindingly obvious PowerPoint is presentation software so if a presentation is created it ought to be presented. Since I’ve seldom seen a professional use it well for the purpose for which it was intended there is useful learning to be had here.

So that the task doesn’t become a lifetime’s work I’ll suggest a couple of things. Your learners will hate you for it but set a limit of, say, four slides and insist on a plain white background. Couch the task in terms of the sort of vocabulary that prompts a response higher up Bloom’s Taxonomy than the basic, “Make me a PowerPoint about…”

Then they have to present!

They could make a scrolling information screen which requires no presentation but a different kind of capability.

What about an interactive one with hyperlinks to pages (and back again) so that it is an electronic reference? This can be developed into a branching database or an interactive adventure story.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to make a frame for MovieMaker or PhotoStory which has text with or without images then an easy way is to create it as a PowerPoint slide and save as a JPEG.

PowerPoint can be used to model phases of history if the transitions are set up proportionately to represent periods of time. Just let it run without having to press any keys and a slide will stay on the screen for a period that represents that event in terms of the time it lasted compared to other events in the sequence. It's an electronic timeline. Choose images and text that reflect the event. Try British monarchs of the 20^th century and see Edward VIII whizz by while George VI stays on the screen for longer. OK not an exciting project but you get the idea.

If the frames are set to transition automatically and rapidly you can make an animation. Save it as a movie rather than a presentation and no one need ever know!

PowerPoint also provides a cheap alternative to buying a branching database which is often used only in a small window each year.

There are lots of other things you can do using sound and dialogue boxes and so on but I’m not suggesting PowerPoint ad nauseam. It’s really important to have experience with a variety of software perhaps even comparing applications to perform the same task and talking about the issues. My point is that a piece of software is only as good or as bad as the quality of the task that has been set.

And lastly, if it's not a presentation to a copresent audience, publish it so that the work has an audience.