Slideshow displays for teaching

I'd like some opinions on slideshow displays for teaching. I attended a class by someone that created a slideshow display for basic prim building and although it seemed like a good idea, I found myself not looking at the 'screen' as much as I thought... I relied more on reading the spoken text. Any suggestions on how these could be made better? Or should they only be used for 1 aspect of teaching instead of used for building prims where your camera is almost always looking at what you're building?

Hi Dragon,

You ask some good questions. When I first saw these displays, I thought "OMG PowerPoint has invaded SL too!" But, I think they have their place, just as PowerPoint does, if used appropriately.

Several years ago, I made a conference presentation on "Effective Teaching with PowerPoint: A Learning Theory Approach", which might provide some guidance on using slideshow displays in SL as well. In this presentation, I examine teaching and learning from an information-processing perspective, using the events of instruction developed by Robert Gagne. Then, I apply these ideas to developing PowerPoint presentations that effectively support instruction. I present many example slides highlighting important instructional capabilities of this technology.

An online version of this presentation is at:

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=SWR0417

Pietro


PS - This presentation has been THE (#1) most popular resource in the EDUCAUSE Content Library for about two years now!

ah, powerpoint, got to love it.

For those that havent seen it, "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" by Edward Tufte is just fantastic, and for extra hilarity a powerpoint-style version can be found here:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000931

Seriously though, from my own very limited experience trying to help people with doing stuff, the main requirement for helping people with common SL tasks is a big image of the UI - and some kind of highlighter to show the buttons/etc that need pressed. Other than that, slides might make up for the very slow rate of typed communication - I attended one hour long meeting at Pathfinder's that could have been over in 10 minutes in RL.