Archive | February, 2010

Banish the PowerPoint Curriculum

Posted on February 27, 2010 by in Design, Leadership

I’ve been read­ing Garr Reynolds’s book Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen (and am a fan of his blog, too). I picked it up because I wanted to improve my pre­sen­ta­tion and design skills, but in the process I’m see­ing some par­al­lels with cur­ricu­lum design.

We’re all famil­iar with the “Death by Pow­er­Point” scenario:

Some of the char­ac­ter­is­tics typ­i­cal of bad Pow­er­Point presentations:

  • Slides crammed with content
  • Mean­ing­less clip art, ani­ma­tions, and effects
  • A super­flu­ous presenter
  • Poor design based on stock templates

Pow­er­Point, used poorly, can crip­ple a pow­er­ful mes­sage. In fact, the use of Pow­er­Point as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool may even be partly to blame for the dis­as­ter that destroyed the Space Shut­tle Colum­bia.

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No Longer a Teacher

Posted on February 6, 2010 by in Design

yellow classroom doors
Image by lai­hiu via Flickr

Per­cep­tive read­ers of this blog (er, maybe using the plural there is pre­sump­tu­ous) will notice that the tagline has changed. Though I will still have a bent towards tech­nol­ogy and gifted edu­ca­tion here, because both of those are pas­sions of mine, I decided the change was in order for two reasons.

First, from the start my posts have often ranged beyond those two top­ics into other areas of edu­ca­tion, and I always felt awk­ward writ­ing out­side of my declared focus area. The new tag more accu­rately reflects what I write about and why.

Sec­ond, I have begun to real­ize that teach­ers can no longer afford to be just teach­ers.

[Cue Don LaFontaine:] In a world where tests reign and text­books rule, one tire­less soul has the power to turn a rag­tag bunch of kids into a lean, mean, learn­ing machine: The Teacher. [Thank you. That will be all, Mr. Fontaine.]


Before we can be teach­ers, though, we must first add two other titles to our resumes: learner and designer.

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