DEATH BY POWERPOINT

It’s a rare professor who hasn’t been tempted in recent years to put his or her lecture notes on transparencies or PowerPoint. It takes some effort to create the slides, but once they’re done, teaching is easy. The course material is nicely organized, attractively formatted, and easy to present, and revising and updating the notes each year is trivial. You can put handouts of the slides on the Web so the students have convenient access to them, and if the students bring copies to class and so don’t have to take notes, you can cover the material efficiently and effectively and maybe even get to some of that vitally important stuff that’s always omitted because the semester runs out.