Page 64 - Computer Basics- Student Textbook

But the real game changer is this: If your students HEAR the information, and you create a way for them to SEE
illustrations of what you are telling them then the retention goes up to about 50%. If you can get the student to tell
you what you have just taught them, they will remember about 70% of the information. However, if you somehow
incorporate something in your lesson where they have to DO something in response to what they are learning, you
will find that a student will remember around a whopping 90% of the material. Amazing, isn’t it?

Here is an illustration of this principle. You want to teach your students how to
build a cabinet. You can tell them about the process of selecting materials,
purchasing, cutting up their materials, assembling the cabinet, and final finish. Do
you think after even going over the process several times, that any student in
your class could build a cabinet? Probably not.

So, you step up the process. You demonstrate how to build a cabinet. The entire
class watches you cut out the parts and assemble it. You demonstrate how to
make the doors and how to attach them to the frames. When you are done, you
still will not have a student who really knows how to build a cabinet. The
students may have a little better idea, but most of them would fail at building a
cabinet on their own.

Your best approach is for you to make them cut out the pieces of the cabinet, stopping along the way, giving them
instruction and showing them how, but letting them put a cabinet together on their own. If you do it that way,
guess what? At the end of the class, the students will know how to build a cabinet.

Did you know that when the effective teacher has completed the class, the students should know how to do what
was taught? In fact, that is the real test of an effective (great) teacher. If students can DO what you have taught
them to DO, then you have taught. Otherwise, as the teacher, you have just exercised your mouth.

Now let’s apply this information to preaching a sermon or teaching a lesson. In presenting a sermon or lesson,
most pastors or teachers stand up in front of the audience in front of a pulpit. They read the Bible and perhaps talk
for about 45 minutes, so the audience just HEARS what the pastor shares. So basically, they lecture. Most people
can concentrate on a sermon for about 25 minutes. After that, their mind begins to wander. That’s just the way
God made us. It’s then no surprise that few people can remember the subject of last week’s sermon let along any
of its points and why so many Christians can sit in church for years and know so little about God’s Word.

But, you say, that’s what preachers do. They get up and talk for 45 minutes and that’s what we have been doing for
zillions of years! It’s funny when we keep doing the same thing over and over again even though it is the least
effective way to pass information on to our audience!

Years ago, my pastor wanted to preach a sermon on Joseph, Mary’s husband. It was to be a Christmas sermon. I
challenged my pastor to be creative and try something different rather than presenting a sermon. The next Sunday
the pastor came out dressed like Joseph with a full beard. His entire sermon was a dramatization of what Joseph
must have thought or felt when Mary got pregnant and through the entire birth process. The audience was
mesmerized. I can, to this day (about 45 years later) remember almost every point of the sermon. It was amazing!

So, a great teacher or preacher works very hard at involving his students in the passage at hand, bringing them to
the point of doing something about what they are learning. Interaction is the key to retention and audio-visual
presentations added to your sermon or lecture add a great deal toward student retention!

Creating a PowerPoint is a way that a pastor or anyone can create a visual complement to their presentation that
will help those in the audience visually SEE the information and retain it for future use. With this program you will
be creating slides which can be displayed using a video projector connected to your computer. Video projectors
have come down enormously in price and have gotten more powerful in the last few years, and are very affordable.
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