VShappened to the mother of two teenagers. Her daughter asked her to come and see what she had prepared for her. It was a PowerPoint, the name of this software which makes it possible to produce presentations in the form of slides ( slides), explaining to his parents, bullet after bullet- either point by point – the benefits she would have if they bought her an iPhone. The mother left the screening before the end (“it was all the com’d’Apple! »). But the girl’s effort deserves to draw attention to a new element: the ease with which older children and teenagers draw slides. From the first presentations, in primary school, to the internship defenses, through the patent oral, their school life is now as punctuated by slide shows as the career of a McKinsey consultant. As for their parents, they hesitate between admiration (because they would be incapable of doing the same) and dismay at the idea that the map of Germany could be rotated on a slide without even knowing the capital.
How do we recognize them?
Teenagers start at a quarter turn. Together, they divide up the work by counting the number of slides for each. They know how to do everything on a smartphone, sometimes use Canva software rather than PowerPoint, carry out quizzes using Kahoot applications! or Wooclap, but struggle on a PC to save a document on the desktop or to find the apostrophe on the keyboard. They have a very precise idea – much more than their parents, in any case – of the maximum number of words to put on a slide. They make presentations bordering on animated cinema, in which they make objects move, but where they can’t find the spell checker. They never forget the slide “thank you for your attention” at the end. They have parents who, when they want to perfect their presentations at work, resort to bold and underlining. Parents who wonder what their children can get out of these presentations full of copy and paste from the Internet, whereas in their day presentations were made from incomprehensible paragraphs copied from encyclopedias before being pasted on cardboard panels.
how they talk
“We could also do a quiz. » “I’m going to put memes, it’s worth points. » “But yes, we will make a plan… later…” “But why did you change the font? » “I think you get extra points if you put in a summary. »
Their Great Truths
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