Now that PowerPoint has become passé, what is the next big thing we should use to display our song words?
Check out my latest post at sydneyanglicans.net and give me your thoughts as to what you think is the Next Big Thing.
Category: Software
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are today running a story in the ‘Next’ IT section of their newspapers on my use of the Moodle program for our online learning at Youthworks College.
The article, titled “Use your moodle to deliver lessons” outlines the benefits of online learning, and documents some of the process by which we implemented it in our teaching.
Here is an excerpt:
Jodie McNeill, priest, lecturer and technology enthusiast, fell in love with Moodle late last year.
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The open source course management system (CMS) is at the heart of Mr McNeill’s theology course for school-leavers, Year 13. Every week he uses the online system to post texts required for the following lesson.
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Students must read them and complete comprehension tests before moving on. At the end, they must enter a summary and ask questions. Mr McNeill then monitors the answers and uses them to prepare his weekly face-to-face lectures.
An interesting article in today’s SMHÂ suggests that the way in which we have been using PowerPoint in many of our churches and educational institutions is in fact working against the learning process, not helping it.
I have had a hunch about this for some time, and have stopped using PowerPoint to accompany my sermons and youth talks. The main reason is that I feel that PowerPoint creates a gap between preacher/teacher and congregation/class, and that simply talking allows much more scope for relationship. The fact that Gen Y’s crave experience over explanation points further to the fact that a speaker who speaks with emotion and engages the crowd will be more likely to have an impact than those who present the information in a formal teaching style.
Even more interesting is the observation that by reading along in our Bibles when the Bible reading is spoken in church may in fact be making it harder for us to comprehend the message.