Ten years ago, most of us couldn't have imagined how much we would be doing with a computer today. I can't see any reason not to assume that we will be able to say the same thing 10 years from now. By then, teachers will be hearing war stories of the old days when they used printed books, papers, photographs, and other visual aids - when they had to have multiple copies or pass things around the room. They won't even be able to imagine teaching without their computer or with a computer that couldn't be seen by the whole class at one time.We'd like to suggest that you consider sharing your computer know-how with others. Set up a neighbourhood class, help group, or demonstration at a school. Show others how to: make Windows '95 sit up and sing, how useful word processing can be, how easy it is to send E-mail, how much you can find on the Internet, how exciting a computer game can be, or some other way a computer can improve their quality of life. If you want to do that, you'II want software and hardware to make teaching a group simple and fun. The tools to help you use your computer to teach a group are called presentation tools.
Software: There are basically two general types of software used to teach groups. Some use HTML, the language of the Web, with an Internet browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. While there are many programs that will help you create HTML (so good they practically do it for you). You'II have far fewer problems with software specifically designed for presentations.
Imagine a picture of a forest or a mountain meadow, with a sentence or two at the top. The presenter clicks a button and a bullet (1) comes up from the bottom with the first item of a list. S/he clicks again, and a second bullet flies in from the right with the second item, and so on. Sometimes the presenter's click will cause a picture or table to fade in (or out), the whole screen to roll out, fade, or shrink until it disappears - to be replaced by the next slide.
This is what presentation software does. While there are many different software packages for computer presentations, more than 90% of today's lecturers use one of two name-brand packages-Presentations (Corel) and Power Point (Microsoft). Both are robust, extremely stable, sophisticated programs. They create slide shows, allow for animations, different appearances, backgrounds, common themes, and more options than I could possible list. They usually include a wide variety of backgrounds or themes on which your text and images can appear.
While Power Point has considerably more users, both software packages will read each other's file formats. Another feature is that either package will convert word processing documents to slide shows for presentations. If you want to buy presentation software, you should pick the one that complements your word processor. If you use Word Perfect, go with Presentations. If you use Word for Windows, go with PowerPoint.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
