Powerpoint Pros & Cons

I really liked watching the Powerpoint presentations today, it was fun to learn more about my classmates and get a peek into their lives outside of school. I really liked the creativity in Josh's presentation, his slides had a good mix of text and photos and I loved his opening collage. I also liked how Kelsey used photos to give insight into her life and passions, they way her photos floated up into the slides (I don't know how to do that) was cool and the effect created by her final slide was great. She used the animations in a limited way which made them effective.
Rachel did a great job evoking emotion with her slides and video but some of her slides were really wordy, which I found distracting. Alexis and Scott both demonstrated a good use of graphs and graphics.
The things I found less engaging or more ineffective were the overuse of animations and too many words on a slide. The things I saw that bugged me the most were grammar and spelling errors. I think that as teachers those types of errors are unacceptable, especially when you are broadcasting them on a Smart Board.
If I were to redo my presentaion I would try to use a little more creativity and mix up the format of my slides. I think my preseatation was very "busy" and I relied too heavily on photos. I really need to learn everything that Powerpoint is cabable of so I can make my presentions more pleasing to the eye. I think that Powerpoint can be effective as a visual tool but it can also be overused. I was guilty of doing that in my mini-teach. I think I will use Powerpoint as a teacher when I want to show a series of photos or images but I don't think it is good to use as a crutch for lecturing.