Presentations and hyperlinks

Today - well, last week, actually, but today brought it into focus - I discovered a small but interesting gap in the knowledge of my students.

My Y9 science class was making biological keys on powerpoints. The idea here is that you ask a series of questions that allow you to identify an animal or plant correctly. They can be quite sophisticated, but we are dealing with really obvious physical characteristics (for the most part). So I made an exemplar using snakes. I ask a question ('is the snake venomous?') that can have two possible answers ('the snake is venomous' or 'the snake is not venomous'). You go on asking questions until only one of your possible snakes meets the description, then it must be the snake you're after. Each answer, in this case, is then a hyperlink, taking the student to either the next question, or to a successful identification.

The interesting gap was the hyperlinks. Not the mechanics of how to make them, which is just a fact in the operation of the programme, but the whole idea of hyperlinks, of using them to jump from one place in a document to another, or from that document to another one entirely. Sure, students know how to click on them and what they do, but the idea of making one and using one to create a non-linear document was something that they had no real understanding of.

I hope they left my class today with a deeper understanding of how you can use hyperlinks to create connections between information and create a web of paths that can take you to more interesting places than a linear progression might. I suspect that many of them left with the knowledge of how to make a hyperlink to another slide in a powerpoint presentation, and are satisfied with not thinking about the wider picture.

Nevermind. I now have to upload all their powerpoints onto the class page, so they can show their family what they made. But that's a story for another day.