Recently, I read a series of articles pertaining to the discussion of professors and teachers relying too heavily on PowerPoint presentations for their teaching. I have had many teachers from middle school up until now who have been very reliant on PowerPoint presentations. I agree that there are many issues in the current education system and the problem is growing as more and more teachers (at least from my experience) have been getting "lazy" and are defaulting to teach using a basic slideshow.

The movement to ban PowerPoint from certain universities was actually started by a professor, Ben Meir Sorensen, who used PowerPoint. Sorensen claimed this realization sprung from the fact that he was boring himself through teaching using a Powerpoint during a lecture. "A PowerPoint presentation locks the lecture into a course that disregards any input other than the lecturer's own idea… it cuts off the possibility of improvisation and deviation, and the chance to adapt to student input without veering off course." Sorensen discusses PowerPoint's origin and how it was created to help with sales and business proposals, which leads to the issues of education losing its sense of importance and the ability for students to actually learn and understand the concepts being taught.

"As it turns out, PowerPoint has not empowered academia. The basic problem is that a lecturer isn't intended to be selling bullet point knowledge to students, rather they should be making the students encounter problems. Such a learning process is slow and arduous, and cannot be summed up neatly. PowerPoint produces stupidity, which is why some, such as American statistician Edward Tufte have said it is "evil"."

When my instructors are using a PowerPoint for their lecture they often move too quickly or not fast enough leaving the class to cause more stress or to drag along and feel like an eternity. Missing something during the presentation when the instructor moves too quickly is a piece of learning that is lost. Banning PowerPoints from classrooms can create a better atmosphere which leads to improvements in student engagement and grades.

Paul Ralph claims that the three main reasons PowerPoint slides are toxic in education are:

I have two professors this semester who rely heavily on PowerPoint for their lectures and I realize that I am not as attentive in those classes as I am in the ones in which my professors do not use PowerPoint.

Looking at a screen and having a professor read from it for an hour and fifteen minutes feels like torture as it is far from my learning style and overall is not engaging