Visual communication in schools - when is it too early?

During a meeting today: "You make presentations? Can you believe that my children are actually producing PowerPoint in school at the moment?"

It made me look back at my own time in school. There was virtually zero training in visual communication. And now that I think of it, this is actually not solely because of a lack of technology (I got my first home computer at around 1986).

• Primary school. No visuals were encouraged when you had to do your lecture on let's say "the hamster"
• High school. The teacher would write his course notes in long sentences on the black board and asked us to copy them in our note books
• In economics there was a total absence of describing market forces, company strategy, and results of data analysis in conceptual graphs
• Writing was all about correct senstences and grammar, not convincing structure or logic
• Later in university, professors would put overhead copies of his course material on the projector, requiring you to study the 4 aspects (bullet points) of issue A, B, and C.

I hope things are better now. My kids are a bit too young still for me to get first-hand experience.

Making things more difficult, visual communication would probably involve the combination of a number of subjects. In high school: economics, mathematics/logic, language, arts, etc.

Does the availability of PowerPoint in the highschool class room today actually help to make kids better at communicating? Or is it counter productive?