Students fill in the blanks: connecting concepts with powerpoint

Krista Wilkinson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Communication Science and Disorders

The availability of course notes online has been noted by Emerson students as one of the most helpful uses of WebCT. Professors often post PowerPoint slides to their course Web sites for students to print for class, which helps them better process the lecture while taking notes.

Professor Krista Wilkinson uses particular strategies for class that help students understand key theories, concepts, and to make connections among them.

For her two classes, CD683 Foundation of Language Acquisition and CD 686 Language Disorders through the Preschool Years, Professor Wilkinson omits key words and information from the notes to help students stay on track with notetaking while engaging in the lecture. Further, using Venn diagrams, shapes, arrows, and images that appear meaningfully through animation, the PowerPoint use emphasizes the relationship among the theories and their implications through examples.

The following images show a sample of Wilkinson's slides. Wilkinson explains, "the version on the left, the white version, is what students download before class, so they have the skeleton but not the material within. The version with the blue background is my presentation, with the animations...so you can see on the second two slides what comes in as we talk through it. This allows me to ask the students to generate the information, to think about it, but then after that discussion to display my own summary for them to write down."

Posted to WebCT	Presented in Class

For further information on using PowerPoint for teaching, please contact the Instructional Technology Group at 617.824.8961.