I am a big fan of the Google slideshow. Every one of my students knows how to do it without any help. They can share it with each other and share it with me, which makes it quick and efficient. They can include just the right amount of pictures and text for it to be informative and visually pleasing. We can throw it up on the big screen in the classroom during their presentations for all to see and enjoy. It’s perfect, and I hate it.
     Actually, I don’t think the Google slideshow is so perfect. I have no statistical evidence to back me up on this, but I think, based on many of the slideshows I’ve seen this year, that my students see the ease of the google slideshow as an indicator of the ease of the assignment itself. In other words, their presentations seem to skim the surface of the topic I’ve asked them to present. A few pictures, graphs, charts, illustrations, etc. get slapped onto a slide. A bit of information from the very first site they google gets added to that, and voila! They think they’re done. It doesn’t really matter that my elaborate assignment write-up requires that they dig deep and think critically about their sources. It doesn’t really matter that I’ve asked great essential questions that they can sink their teeth into. They see that they can do a slideshow, and all bets are off. I get the same shallow product time and time again. It can’t be a coincidence, can it?
     I decided to test out my hypothesis during finals week with my seniors this year. Their final project required them to choose symbols from their lives that coincided with symbols from the last novel we read. They had to reflect on the meaning of the symbols they chose and make connections to the symbols from the book. I required pictures and quite a bit of writing. On the day of the final, they had to present just one or two symbols to the class. There was one caveat, though. They could not use Google slides.
      I did find that their products this time around were much better than previous ones. Unfortunately, I realized pretty quickly that my experiment was flawed. Too many variables. This was a final, so of course they would place more importance on it, right? Also, there was an element of personal reflection that the other assignments did not have. That element was the best part of the project for most of them. I was comparing apples to oranges.
     I can say one thing, though. I received some pretty amazing projects. Students created photo essays, websites, sketch books, travel journals, and story boards. When they showed their work to the rest of the class, I could see that the students were much more interested in their presentations. The artists could be artistic, the techies could be …um…technological. Their projects became more personal.  I could also tell that they were proud of their work. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a senior student proud of their slideshow.
     I’m not ready to ditch the slideshow just yet. It has its benefits and it definitely has its place in my class. I will, however, require my students to use other modes for presenting information, which should inspire them to make the method reflect the message.
     By the way, I’m not a big fan of Prezi, either.