PowerPoint zoomed into our classrooms in the early 2000s and offered the modern teacher endless combinations of animations, font choices and templates with which to deliver their lessons.

The spinning slide transitions and creative clipart ensured that Microsoft’s presentation-making programme quickly secured its position as every teacher’s slideshow sidekick. It turned education on its head and transformed the way we teach, right?

In a way, yes, says primary school teacher Ian Goldsworthy. But it hasn’t been for the better. Now, he’s not saying PowerPoint is evil, but suggests that, like the wickedest of villians, it does influence teachers into adopting a certain characteristic.

Laziness.

That’s what Goldsworthy says PowerPoint is: an awful, disguise for a lazy teacher simply reading out what’s on the screen.

You may be silently protesting that you favour visual aids instead of paragraphs of text when you produce slideshows, but this doesn’t get around the problem, he says. The more razzmatazz that you add to your slides, the more they detract from what you want the class to actually learn.

Strip all this away, and ask yourself: is PowerPoint really so different to what it replaced: the (now ancient) overhead projector? Do all the hours spent preparing slides really translate into an equivalent gain in learning? Does the ubiquity of this software trick us into finding something online and thinking “this’ll do”, despite all the distracting clipart?

It’s time to stop kidding ourselves - PowerPoint alone doesn’t do anything to improve teaching. It may sometimes be a potent tool for processing and deepening learning, but most of the time it’s not. Too often, it’s nothing more than a fig leaf that hides the fact that, in truth, we’re really just standing in front of a great big wall of Comic Sans.