I have never been a fan of PowerPoint but have recently found a new use for
it as a storyboarding tool for planning qualitative data collection in the
classroom.

My own research involves designing (software) resource-based activities and
trialling them with school children. One difficulty I have encountered is
co-ordinating designing the resources with designing the activities, as well
as considering how the children might respond during the trial. When I focus
on the resources my designs become overly techno-centric; when I focus on
the activities my designs become overly prescriptive; then I when focus on
children’s possible reactions I often discover fatal, fundamental flaws in
my designs!

I have recently attempted to resolve this conflict by using a storyboard
approach. The resources are designed by imagining children manipulating them
in real-time from frame to frame. I create simplified graphical images of
the resources in PowerPoint and follow through stepwise manipulations from
slide to slide accompanied by a brief explanation. I have found this
incredibly useful for identifying potentialities and limitations early on.

The benefits of PowerPoint for storyboarding are two fold:

Firstly, each new slide is easily created by copy-pasting the previous and
making small adjustments to the graphic. This means that lots of ideas can
be tried out quickly by considering how different children might respond to
the resources within the context of a given activity. When I run into
problems I can return to an earlier slide, copy-paste it anew, and start an
alternative possible sequence of events.

Secondly, the “click to add notes” facility means I can go back and add
date-stamped comments and suggestions. As such I build up a timeline of my
own thinking which I have found helpful for reflecting on, collating and
co-ordinating my ideas. I also e-mail the .ppt file to colleagues who add
their own date-stamped comments to relevant slides. The only disadvantage of
this is that, unlike Word, PowerPoint does not offer a “Reviewing” mode. As
such others’ comments have to be searched for amongst storyboards that can
quickly grow to 100+ slides. One way round this is to provide an index slide
where each participant can list those slides on which they have commented.
However this has to be done manually and is a bit fiddly and error-prone.

I don’t know if that is of interest to those on this message board but my
colleagues and I are finding it useful so I thought I’d share.

Ian