Joy E. Miller

Teaching grade school students how to use PowerPoint 2007 is really quite easy. PowerPoint is a fun program to work with and, from my experience, the students are eager to learn about it. I encourage you to download the free presentation template that I created for my teaching engagement from Office Online (link is below) to use as a starting point.

To view a video with the teacher and some of the students in this classroom that explains how the they use Office 2007 in their classroom, see Using PowerPoint in the classroom.

Besides writing and publishing technical content to Microsoft Office Online, in my spare time, I’m the mother of twin, ten year-old boys.

My boys are in an accelerated 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classroom. The proud parent that I am, I like to brag that my kids were accepted into this esteemed classroom only after taking and passing an aptitude entrance exam.

In their classroom, the students spend time on all the usual subjects — math, literature, reading, etc. — but they also spend time working on Future Problem Solving (FPS) topics. Topics that they are analyzing this year include Olympic Games, Cyber Conflict, Space Junk, Counterfeit Economy, and Pandemic. You can learn more about FPS by going to the Future Problem Solving Program International, Inc. web site.

The computer software resources in their classroom includes Microsoft Office Word and PowerPoint. The students use Word to compose essays about books they’ve read, topic reports, and other assignments related to Future Problem Solving. Some use PowerPoint to present the content in their topic reports. And, at the end of each day, a student is assigned to research and document a historical event for the following day in a single slide in PowerPoint. The following day, the class acknowledges and celebrates the historical event by viewing the gathered information in PowerPoint. The students say that there's something to celebrate every day!

The classroom recently upgraded to Office 2007. With the new look and design of the software, I took it upon myself to meet with the class to present an overview and demonstrate the difference between PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007. I covered how to navigate the new user interface, I showed off some of the cool new features PowerPoint 2007 offers, and I showed some of the basics of creating an interesting presentation, without overdoing it.

If you want to teach a grade school audience how to use PowerPoint 2007, I recommend that you download and use the presentation template I created titled Teach grade school students how to use PowerPoint 2007. The template summarizes the new user interface and includes populated notes pages. Both the template and the resources that I list below should help people who have never used PowerPoint before, and also those who have used earlier versions of PowerPoint, to come up to speed with PowerPoint 2007.

Additional FREE training resources

The following is a list of resources that you can use in your training, or you can point your students to review them individually:

• Hands-on Training Course: Up to speed with PowerPoint 2007
• Interactive Guide: Map PowerPoint 2003 features to the 2007 user interface
• 6-minute Demo: Up to Speed with PowerPoint 2007 (download)

About the author

Joy Miller has worked as technical writer for Microsoft for 12 years. In her earlier years at Microsoft, Joy wrote technical content for IT Professionals in Windows on topics such as Active Directory, Software Distribution, and Group Policy. She decided 8 years ago that it would be much more fun to connect with the people who use Office products. She has worked on products such as Word, FrontPage, Windows SharePoint Services, and PowerPoint.