Culture is described in Microsoft Encarta® as "the patterns of behavior and thinking that people living in social groups learn, create, and share. … A people's culture includes their beliefs, rules of behavior, language, rituals, art, technology, styles of dress, ways of producing and cooking food, religion, and political and economic systems."

Students can conduct small ethnographic research projects on the many aspects of human culture around them and then share their observations with the class. Microsoft PowerPoint can help them organize and present their observations.

Gathering information

To complete the assignment, students study another culture or select a social group within their own culture to examine. They can use reference resources such as cultural anthropology journals, textbooks, or encyclopedias, but they should also spend some time observing and interviewing members of the culture. Possible assignments could include attending a service of a religious group that the student is interested in learning more about, or observing a ceremony or festival of a national or ethnic group other than the student's own. The students could also choose to study a practice or group in their own culture. For example, they could observe members of a sports team or the interactions of children at a local park.

For suggestions on organizing information from interviews, see Use Outlook to help set up interviews and research.

Creating the presentation

To encourage consistency in the presentations, you may want to provide your students with a template for their presentations. You can select from a gallery of design templates and then modify and save the template so that it meets your requirements.

For more information, see Working with templates in PowerPoint 2002.

Using the slide task panes

The new task pane in PowerPoint gives you one location for the actions you use most when creating a presentation. The task pane is located on the right side of your screen and is present when you first start a Microsoft Office XP or later program.

You can display the slide task panes by clicking the down arrow and selecting the task pane you need. You can use these task panes to do these tasks:

• Slide Layout task pane   Control the arrangement of elements.
• Slide Design task pane  Apply a design template, a color scheme, or an animation scheme.
• Custom Animation task pane   Apply or modify animation effects (for example, entrance effects like "Fly in" or "Checkerboard") to fit your needs.
• Slide Transition task pane   Apply slide transitions (such as "Fade" or "Wipe") for your presentation and change transition settings, such as speed and timing.
• Animation Scheme task pane   Apply preset animation effects uniformly to one or more slides in a presentation, instead of applying each effect yourself in the Custom Animation pane.

Finishing the presentation

Your students can add pictures to their presentations by doing one of the following:

• Add a picture to a slide manually

-or-

• Create a photo album

Timings and transition effects can add polish to the presentation. Your students can also prepare handouts for the class from their slide notes. For more information, see:

• Add transition effects between slides
• Set timings for a slide show
• Print handouts in PowerPoint