Power Point & Benjamin Bloom in 1956

Power Point is a great tool for classroom lectures because it gives you a chance to reach a larger audience.  Of course  your audience being the classroom, 25-30 students will not increase, but reach in the sense of listening.  Power Point it a great tool to use to get peoples (students) attention and keep them interested.  Power point does this by highlighting key points, using bright colors, animation, and sound.  When a question comes up on the test, a student might recall a slide from the Power Point presentation that will allow him/her to answer the question correctly.

The students will generally be more interested in the lecture and hopefully will better retain the information included in the lecture.  Students might also be impressed with the lecture and genuinely have more interest in the subject matter.  It is a win for teacher and for students.

Teachers should well be aware of these benefits and be willing and able to use the program to enhance their lectures.  They are aware that students will be amused by the sound effects and the humor will pull them in.  Animation will keep them interested  and therefore (hopefully) the information being discussed will stick.  Using   Power Point in my lectures will help both my ability to reach students as well as helping the students acquire and retain the subject matter.

Also making learning better was Benjamin Bloom.  Way, way back in 1956 he led a team of psychologists to come up with a better understanding of student comprehension.  They found that pretty much the only thing that teachers were asking of students was memory based information.  Simple stuff like when, with less emphasis on the why and how.  That would lead to students with great memory retention doing well while a smarter student with a greater knowledge of understanding not doing so well.

He and his team came up with 6 other levels of higher reasoning to grasp subject matter.  These 6 layers of understanding would create a create a greater depth of overall knowledge.  The six levels started with the lowest level of understanding being Knowledge, followed by; Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and finally Evaluation.   Back in the day, students had to know when something happened.  After Benjamin Bloom students had to have a greater level of understanding because the questions that teachers would be asking required analysis, synthesis, and application of their newly acquired knowledge.  He basically made future students universally more intelligent.  He all owe him a smarty level of gratitude.  Conversely, those of us (no one here) can also thank him and his team for all the bad grades they got in history and reading comprehension back in High School.