Digital Kills Paper

I remember the days when we had to do full out bristle board poster displays for projects on Mars in Geography Class and Gambling Addicts for Health Sciences. This was of course many years ago when I was still in elementary school and the power of PowerPoint had not taken over the poor paper presentations of the past. These historic projects on paper took many more hours to produce and required precession cutting and pasting of text and images. Once high school hit the digital age took over and paper soon became extinct. No longer were students required to create bristle board presentations and displays for their teachers and classmates. Teachers began giving demos on the use of PowerPoint and its benefits for presentations. I can now say that I am a power point master after having done around 50+ presentations for a number of classes in the past 7+ years. It seems the idea of creativity has run out the door because most PowerPoint presentations are predictable with a prefabricated introduction, body and conclusion. It is hard to break away from this mold because this is what we are taught to do in order to get the best results. The hardest part with a PowerPoint presentation is keeping the audiences attention. Students have seen hundreds of PowerPoint presentations so it is difficult to make yours unique and fresh. I’m sure Microsoft is developing new additions to their PowerPoint application to make it the be all and end all of presentation software. The benefit to Microsoft’s domination is less trees being cut down in order to produce bristle board for little Timmy’s Grade 5 Science Fair.