Developing PowerPoint Standards for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

As we live in a time when standards, frameworks, and benchmarks are becoming increasingly prominent, it makes sense that some sort of teacher technology standards would be desirable. Standards on the state or national levels call for the integrating of multimedia into teaching, but there are not clear guidelines illustrating how integrating a technology into the classroom should be accomplished. Nor is there an evaluation system in place to ensure that teachers possess the multimedia skills and knowledge required in teaching. It is thus important to devise a set of teacher technology standards as a resource for teachers as they attempt to integrate multimedia into their curricula. Therefore, this study provided a set of guidelines and standards for evaluating PowerPoint presentations for use in language teaching to provide more support to language teachers at the institutional level. In this article, four case studies of PowerPoint presentation in Chinese language teaching sample slides are explored to show how the devised standard guidelines and a score assessment system can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a presentation and thus to help language instructors to develop their skills in making PowerPoint Presentations and improving teaching effectiveness. A proposed teacher PowerPoint standards were developed based on the author’s personal experience teaching Chinese using multimedia in classrooms in China, Europe and America will also be shared in this case study.