Photo credit: jurvetson
I’ve found a good theme recently so I’m going to stick with it. I came across this great blog post by “Speaker Sue” in which she points out what Blue Man Group can teach us about – you guessed it! – presentations!
Imagine your classroom (or your next professional development, or your next parent group meeting…) if you had a killer slide deck and you incorporated some of what Sue suggests:
I’m not suggesting that every presentation you give needs to be a “party,” but I think sometimes as teachers we sell ourselves short in terms of how important the human aspect is when communicating with students. I mean let’s face it, if rote memorization was the goal we could all very easily be out of work. The textbook (or the overhead, or the slide deck) brings the content, but it’s the teacher who brings the passion.
Sue’s post really underscores the point that it’s not about the technology.
[via Patrick Rhone]
I received an email from Brian, a middle school social studies teacher in Boston, who expressed an interest in presenting to his faculty about improving his presentation skills. He wrote:
The creative juices that flow as I try and design better slides has not only provided a nice outlet for me in the weeks before Christmas break…but also helped me get more creative in connections I make to the material.
That’s what it’s all about! If you enjoy creating your slides (I do!), you’ll enjoy presenting them. And if you enjoy presenting them rather than making them just a bunch of notes that you have to “get through,” your audience will enjoy your delivery a whole lot more.
My enthusiasm for your presentation, which I shared with a number of members of my staff, has made me into the resident presentation guru in my building.
Nice. I’m glad to have had this kind of impact!
My principal has asked me to do a presentation on presenting at our upcoming PD and I wondered if you had some advice on how to attack it. My audience would be a frightening mix of the computer savvy and folks who refer to “The Google.” What would you recommend in terms of content? I could see the scope being very broad and touching on why design better slides, how to do it, where to find good images, etc. Or staying narrow and looking at the how part.
First off, I love The Google!
Second, and this is just my two cents, if you’re thinking of presenting on presenting to your staff, you need to provide the context. If that’s how we should be teaching kids, it’s surely how we should be teaching adults.
I didn’t look at my presentation to staff as a “How-To” with respect to PowerPoint (although that’s what some of them came to the session expecting…), I planned it as a “Why-Bother” with the intent of raising the level of awareness of what we’re putting on the screen. If it gave at least one teacher pause before they projected the same, tired slide show for yet another year, I felt my presentation would be worthwhile.
See, the “Why-Bother” actually motivated the “How-To” with about a half-dozen of my attendees. It put it into context for them. Rather than telling them how to do something, I shared with them first why they should care.
And it worked! They stayed after my presentation wanting to know more. “OK – I like how you did that. Now show me how to make my slides look like that.” They’re hooked.
A “How-To” without context may be everything that’s wrong with the way we present professional development to teachers, but that’s for me to tackle down the road. You know – that and this whole “global warming” thing.
Not necessarily educationally related, but I loves me some stats! Now you can see all the statistics on your Flickr photos if you activate your “Flickr stats.”
[via Around the Corner]
My slideshow has been selected by SlideShare as the “Slideshow of the Day” and has been featured on their main page! This is all kind of overwhelming considering I created the slideshow to present to my faculty, then posted it to my blog figuring a couple people might be interested…
Then, based on some requests, I uploaded it to Slideshare and added audio figuring a couple of people might check it out. So imagine my surprise when I had an email in my box this morning saying my little presentation was going to be featured as the “Slideshow of the Day” on their main page.
You asked for it…
For those who expressed interest in a “multimedia” version of my Presentation on Presentations, here is the result of a couple days worth of work. I recorded the voiceover in Garage Band in two takes so there are a couple of flubs (yes, I know video from YouTube isn’t copyrighted, but I didn’t want to go back and re-record…).
Also, SlideShare has a minimum time that each slide must be displayed which causes a minor “out-of-sync” at the end of the slide deck. Other than that, I think it’s a pretty good – albeit “one way” – version of what I presented to my faculty.
Enjoy!
I wrote this post on Monday and wasn’t going to publish it. Then I saw At the Schoolhouse Gate’s recent post about the student who was suspended for posting online a list of students he didn’t like (article here). Seems these here Interwebs have a lot of otherwise level-headed people going off half-cocked.
I’m an active researcher and reader on all things tech and education related, but I never considered the other side of the coin. Having attended a 3-hour meeting this morning at the district office on our “new” filter override process as it relates to CIPA, I am utterly shocked at some of the misinformation that some of my colleagues — intelligent, well-educated, experienced people — have come to assume as fact.
It’s put things into perspective for me, though. Discussing how and when to allow staff members to override the filter is only one piece of the puzzle. Where we consistently fall short is in educating our students and our teachers in responsible use of the Internet.
Overheard this morning:
To be clear, I don’t blame these individuals for not knowing this stuff, but the longer I sat in that meeting biting my tongue, the more frustrated I continued to get because these are the technology leaders in their respective buildings! We (and by “we,” I mean those of us “in the know”) need to be more cognizant of the fact that although this stuff is old-hat to us, it’s completely foreign to many of the people in our organizations.
Call it “Digital Citizenship” or anything else you want, the fact remains that we need to be focusing at least as much energy on educating students and teachers in information literacy as we do on trying to use brute force to protect them from themselves with poorly-implemented filters.
What about you?
I’m thrilled to see something like this so close to home! Within driving distance, no less!
[via The Fischbowl]
I got my first digital video camera last month – a Sanyo Xacti CG65 to be exact. After way too many months of research (and way too many missed opportunities to film my little ones doing things that they may never do again), I decided against going high-def (too much money and not enough ways to play it!) and just bought something simple. I like that it records to SD cards and that I’m able to slurp the video onto my MacBook Pro in minutes instead of waiting for it to import in real-time like with a MiniDV cam.
So we have family far away and they like looking at our Flickr page to keep up-to-date with the kiddos, but I’m not sure that my search for the Flickr of video-sharing sites has yielded a satisfactory result.
I’m trying Vimeo right now (my freshman effort is posted there – first thing I’ve ever done in iMovie and I have to say it’s not as intuitive as I would have hoped…) so watch out Martin Scorcese. One of the things I like with Vimeo is that — as with Flickr — I can make a video viewable to the world, or a specific subset of the world which I deem appropriate. Some will think I’m paranoid, but I don’t like a whole lot of videos and pics of my kiddos to be “out there.” So the granular control over who can see what has been nice.
On the other hand, the site’s been wonky all day today. And there are some other things I like about Flickr that I’d like to have in a video-sharing platform. For instance, in Flickr, regardless of the privacy setting on a pic I can always send a direct link to someone without a Flickr account and they can see the picture. I like that because I know there will be people with whom I’d like to share a video, but who won’t want to go through the “trouble” of signing up for an account, adding me as a “Contact,” and then waiting for me to reciprocate before they can see something I’ve shot.
So I’m temporarily OK with Vimeo — and who knows — I may be missing something that will make it act the way I want it too. But I’d love to know what sites you’ve found useful for sharing videos.
The cause, of course, being to rise to the challenge of bringing students engaging, top-quality instruction.
I’m truly humbled by all of the positive attention my “Presentation on Presentations” has received since I published it one week ago. I’m especially grateful to those who have linked it on their own blogs and increased the potential reach for this work.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating that there is nothing in that presentation that I didn’t learn from following in the footsteps of those who have covered this stuff in far greater detail (Dan, Merlin, Guy, Seth, Garr…). I have merely synthesized from the work of others and distilled it down into a presentation that I gave to a group of faculty.
My goal was to whet their appetites. Not to “convert” them to “my” way of thinking, so much as to show them that there are other (better?) ways to use presentation software — to share the possibilities.
I had a limited amount of time and there is a LOT of information out there. I didn’t know if I’d have another opportunity to share this material with them so I wanted to be sure to include as much as possible in the hour that I had. I wanted to leave them hungry to learn more and to some extent I think that I was successful.
Thanks to all who have commented and linked!
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