Creating an Interactive PowerPoint Lesson for the Lesson

Duquesne University's School of Education graduate students are learning to use available classroom technologies to teach. The curriculum for the Program in Instructional Technology integrates the tools that most schools provide in their own computer labs and classrooms. If students use technology to learn, teachers should use the same technology to teach. The foundation for much of the technology being used in today's classrooms is the Microsoft Office suite. It is fast becoming the integrated software package of choice for many schools and school districts. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access are the staples of many students and teachers. Complementing these tools, Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator are the tools of choice for accessing the Web. Why not help teachers utilize these same tools to develop text, visual, and Web-based materials for the classroom, and leave the more complex and costly packages to multi-media designers and commercial artists? The success of this philosophy has been borne out by a blistering growth in applications from K-12 classroom teachers, technology coordinators, and corporate trainers to join Duquesne's cohort. Interactive Lesson Defined Students in the Program use Microsoft Word to create text-based class handouts, lesson study guides and student workbooks based on their own classroom learning objectives. They use Microsoft Front Page and Netscape Composer to produce online Web-based Virtual Tours. And they use Microsoft's PowerPoint to create an "Interactive Lesson." Interactive lessons take the form of self-paced, student-controlled, individualized learning opportunities embedded with assessment events along the way. In practice, these lessons are offered to students who need individualized instruction, corrective instruction, additional practice, or topical enrichment activities. Specifically, an interactive lesson: * Is a visually-based, behavior-oriented teaching strategy appropriate for learners of all ages who benefit from the concrete learning experiences that graphic presentations offer. * Contains self-paced instructional content appropriate for students who learn best when instructed at their own pace, or who need the benefits provided by remedial instruction outside the classroom. * Offers specific, logical, systematic lessons that foster individualized instruction and sequential learning. * Is student-initiated and student-controlled learning that places a good deal of the responsibility for mastering the material directly in the hands of the learner. * Embraces all phases of the Mastery Learning instructional technique. It suggests alternatives for presenting the initial mastery objectives, corrective instruction, and enrichment activities. The instructional system design model offered by Jerrold Kemp (See Figure 1) is used to create the interactive lesson. Figure 1. The Kemp ISD Model For each of Kemp's Nine Elements, a practical, hands-on task is completed as evidence that the skill has been mastered. Here's how it goes: Step 1: The Instructional Problem Task: Select a topic for an interactive lesson Step 2: Learner Characteristics Task: Identify target learners for the lesson Step 3: Subject Content Task: Identify the specific behavior-based elements that students must master during this lesson Step 4: Instructional Objectives Task: Prepare the behavioral learning objectives providing the specific behavior, condition, and criteria for success Step 5: Sequence the content of the instruction Task: Lay out the instructional progression of your proposed lesson Step 6: Instructional Strategies Task: Create your assessment tools Step 7: Delivery Task: Create and prototype your PowerPoint interactive lesson Step 8: Evaluation Instruments Task: Conduct the assessment for your lesson Step 9: Resources Task: Locate additional resources for the lesson Lesson design by the numbers: seems fairly simple, right? …