Investigating Sociology: PowerPoint

If you’re a teacher looking to spice-up those first Introductory lessons – the ones where you talk your students through “the basics” of Sociology and introduce them to a different way of thinking about the world with the aid of some fascinating-but-strangely-lifeless bullet point slides – you might like to know that I’ve been giving it some thought over the long, hot, summer months.

The upshot of which is this new PowerPoint deck “Investigating Sociology” that riffs on the Sociological Detective theme I’ve developed, on and off, over the past few years. This, I think, is probably a more-developed, coherent, version of this idea and one I’m likely to pursue a little more over the coming months, time-permitting.

The basic idea has been to offer a different, hopefully more-interesting and thoughtful, way to introduce your new students to Sociology. It’s a deck designed to give you, the teacher, control over how and why you develop particular ideas. It’s not something you can simply present to your students “as is” in a fire-and-forget kind of way. Think of it as providing a basic support structure for you to use as a background to your introductory lectures.

Because the Presentation is a bit more than the usual “click-to-advance” list of bullet points you will need to familiarise yourself with the basic structure and navigation system before you let yourself loose with it in front of your students. To this end I’ve put together two versions:

1. The first style is simply a normal PowerPoint deck that you will need to play around with in order to understand the navigation system. It’s not rocket science but it can be a little unusual.

2. The second style adds a menu to the Presentation for pages that need explaining – either because they have a slightly-unusual navigation system or because I’ve included a few suggestions about how to use particular pages / sections of the deck.

While this might sound a little confusing, if you play around with either deck for a few minutes all should become clear.

Finally, both Presentations include spot sounds / music that adds quite a bit to the overall ambiance.

So when you use the deck remember to crank the sound up to 11 for the best possible classroom experience…