chalk-n-talk versus powerpoint

Teaching seems more manageable lately than when I wrote my last entry. But there are other part of life that have been occupying my time: guests from overseas; contract writing assignments; family events; buttoning up the yard for winter.

I've been working this evening on a class session on cultural geography. I have a bunch of slides from previous iterations, and I'm thinking about taking out the very "texty" slides and talking to those points instead. Some of my more "progressive" colleagues pooh-pooh PowerPoint, and God knows, there is lots to ridicule there. I've been trying to shift my ppt use to things I can neither say nor draw/write on the blackboard. Thus: maps, charts, photos, links to video clips, etc. I usually don't annotate them very well in the slides (I have to redo this when I use them in online courses) because they are supposed to be complements to the activities in-class, for the bodies in-class, not a substitute for coming to class. That is, if you skip my class and think you can get all the "Material" from the slides posted online, well, poor sad you. That's not the way I roll.

Yet I am always tempted to write what I call "organizer" slides: headers with 3-5 bullets that show in outline form what I am about to talk about. I talk through these too, but I always feel that SEEING it in words reinforces what I am saying out loud. Lately I have been replacing these organizer slides with writing on the board. I guess my thinking is that it seems more spontaneous and dynamic (although frankly it's all scripted, like 90% of what I teach) and that it engages students differently because it's happening in real time, like a performance, right in front of them.

But then the chalk dust (I wear a lot of black, so there's that), and my poor handwriting. Is chalk-n-talk really qualitatively different than a slide of the same information?