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A Note to History
and Social Studies Teachers Were
you wondering how to make lectures more interesting? Are you trying to get more students
involved during class time to really assess their understanding? Well, students love using computers and
they are, more often than not, visual learners. PowerPoint combines these two aspects of
student interest in one place: multimedia presentations. They love to create them (with all the bells and whistles), use them,
and interact with them during class time… …multimedia,
when done right, is a great classroom resource. Below
is a list of different ways to incorporate PowerPoint into the History/Social
Studies classroom so that it is an asset to instruction and assessment. Categories
of use are on the left and descriptions of specific lessons are on the
right…hope this sparks some ideas for you own use! Skills Instruction
| Incorporating Pictures | Student
Presentations |
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Note-taking: Could
there be a less interesting topic to teach?!
This is the classic “it is for your own good” lesson – but rarely is
it interesting. Consider creating a
PowerPoint presentation complete with pictures and flying text to capture
student interest. Click for a sample.
The presentation does not have to be flashy to be engaging. Reading for Information: One
of the most difficult things for students to do is figure out what is
important information in a reading selection.
A great use of PowerPoint would be to project a reading selection on
the screen and use features in PowerPoint to highlight important vs.
unimportant information. Assess
student understanding by having them come up and highlight what they think is
important before revealing what you’ve chosen. Support-based
Writing The
following presentation guides students to think about their writing
format. Modify the sample paragraph to
fit your students’ needs and see their writing transform as they use this
model. |
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While
over-head projectors are great, sometimes they do not capture the full effect
of a photograph. PowerPoint is a great
tool for incorporating pictures into class time. Here are some ideas… (1) Native
American studies: Use a slideshow to incorporate paintings done by George Catlin in the early years of the nation. This is an effective way to introduce
students to Pre-Columbian North America (or) Westward Expansion (2) European
Exploration: Students typically see a Mercator Projection of the world in today’s
classrooms, but what did the world look like in the year 400? 1200?
1493? Use map projections drawn
before, during, and after some of Pictures are easy to find on the web
and citing them in a presentation demonstrates good research skills! (3) Perception
vs. Reality: Use photographs of German, Irish, and Italian immigrants to
the (4) Conflict: Photographs of government officials
fighting each other are a powerful way to talk about conflict. Use photographs of Congressional
fist-fights, the duel between Hamilton & Burr, and cartoons of
present-day politicians to spark conversation about the causes and effects of
conflict. Include slides with
multiple-choice captions and have students discuss which one they think fits
each picture and why. |
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In addition to
the benefits PowerPoint affords for instruction, it is a great tool for
students to use in class presentations.
The GROUP
PROJECT scenario: (1) Students
conduct research as a group, each student investigating a different piece of
one topic (2) They are
required to combine their information in a visual format and present it to
the class (3) In the
past students have used posterboard to create the
visual, but it is messy and takes a long time to construct (4) Have
students put together a PowerPoint presentation! Take a day
in the computer-lab to model and assist them with the basics of the
program. If this is their first time
with PowerPoint, limit the number of “bells and whistles” (animation, slide
transitions, sound, and color/font changes) they make in a presentation. Set the
parameters for the presentation such as how many slides they should include
(min-max), how many words should be on each slide, and set sources for
pictures. PowerPoint
allows students to add their own information without disturbing another group
members’ part of the presentation.
Most schools have public folders that allow students to save their
work. Students in a single group can
be working at the same time on different parts of a presentation prior to
combining it into one format. Example: Following a webquest on
European Exploration, student groups that were familiar with PowerPoint
combined their information into effectively executed presentations. They were limited to 15 slides and required
to format their text in bullets with NO COMPLETE SENTENCES. PowerPoint allowed students to transition
easily from one topic to another within a single presentation. Additionally, this multimedia format kept
the attention of the presenters’ audience and provided them with an
easy-to-follow way to take notes. |
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PowerPoint Presentations for
Social Studies Free
PowerPoint presentations with graphics and accurate information in over
twenty categories from American History to World Geography. Search to find the best ones within each
category. |
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Homepage
| A. S. C. PowerPoint HTML version | A. S. C. PowerPoint PPT
version © D. Tager | Last
Revised Aril 29, 2008 | e-mail: dtager@sjc.edu |
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