Category Archives: presentations

The Google Slideshow–Love it or Leave it?

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     I am a big fan of the Google slideshow. Every one of my students knows how to do it without any help. They can share it with each other and share it with me, which makes it quick and efficient. They can include just the right amount of pictures and text for it to be informative and visually pleasing. We can throw it up on the big screen in the classroom during their presentations for all to see and enjoy. It’s perfect, and I hate it.
     Actually, I don’t think the Google slideshow is so perfect. I have no statistical evidence to back me up on this, but I think, based on many of the slideshows I’ve seen this year, that my students see the ease of the google slideshow as an indicator of the ease of the assignment itself. In other words, their presentations seem to skim the surface of the topic I’ve asked them to present. A few pictures, graphs, charts, illustrations, etc. get slapped onto a slide. A bit of information from the very first site they google gets added to that, and voila! They think they’re done. It doesn’t really matter that my elaborate assignment write-up requires that they dig deep and think critically about their sources. It doesn’t really matter that I’ve asked great essential questions that they can sink their teeth into. They see that they can do a slideshow, and all bets are off. I get the same shallow product time and time again. It can’t be a coincidence, can it?
     I decided to test out my hypothesis during finals week with my seniors this year. Their final project required them to choose symbols from their lives that coincided with symbols from the last novel we read. They had to reflect on the meaning of the symbols they chose and make connections to the symbols from the book. I required pictures and quite a bit of writing. On the day of the final, they had to present just one or two symbols to the class. There was one caveat, though. They could not use Google slides.
      I did find that their products this time around were much better than previous ones. Unfortunately, I realized pretty quickly that my experiment was flawed. Too many variables. This was a final, so of course they would place more importance on it, right? Also, there was an element of personal reflection that the other assignments did not have. That element was the best part of the project for most of them. I was comparing apples to oranges.
     I can say one thing, though. I received some pretty amazing projects. Students created photo essays, websites, sketch books, travel journals, and story boards. When they showed their work to the rest of the class, I could see that the students were much more interested in their presentations. The artists could be artistic, the techies could be …um…technological. Their projects became more personal.  I could also tell that they were proud of their work. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a senior student proud of their slideshow.
     I’m not ready to ditch the slideshow just yet. It has its benefits and it definitely has its place in my class. I will, however, require my students to use other modes for presenting information, which should inspire them to make the method reflect the message.
     By the way, I’m not a big fan of Prezi, either.
   

A great resource for hi-res film stills

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Looking at film stills is a significant portion of our film studies class.  I usually clip my own shots from our dvd collection but often want images from other movies.  It seemed like there should be a library of these images out there so I looked around a bit.  I found Film Grab and think it is worth sharing. On this site you can search by a few criteria to find the right collection.  The quality of the images is fantastic well curated.  It was such a delight that I start to imagine if other disciplines might be able to see possibilities.

image from Atonement, Joe Wright 2007





partial page view 


Student-Centered Good Times

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Students in my honors English 1 class are writing research papers and they will present a rendition of the TED Talk based on their papers. During the last two weeks, students were tasked with teaching their peers different skills needed in order to start these research projects. The different skills taught are 1)what makes a good TED Talk 2) public speaking skills 3) Nuts and Bolts (paraphrasing, synthesizing and MLA rules) 4) using reliable sources. These are all the skills needed in order to create a successful research paper and TED Talk. Different groups were assigned different skills that they taught/presented to the class. After each student-centered lesson, the students individually assessed the group that had just taught, and immediately “shared” the assessment with the group members. Here is a link to the peer assessment doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ka2eKoDo6QlpiThQQQzLd5e77VrBHcNmbfdp9G_gkcU/edit.

My biggest critique of skills teaching with a student-centered approach is that it takes forever. Students in each group needed to learn the information pertinent to their skills; they had to create a lesson for teaching the information; and, they had to teach their lesson to the entire class. What I could have taught in a fraction of the time, took two weeks for students to complete. Plus, two weeks ago, I had a ton of students out sick, which put off the student-centered lessons as well. The second critique that I have for this type of student learning is that students didn’t always explain the material that they were assigned to teach in a clear and coherent way, so for those situations, I have to take more time to reteach the material.

However, a couple of the groups’ lessons were awesome, and I couldn’t have done a better job myself. The public speaking groups, in both of my two honors classes, killed it! The lessons were fun, engaging and informative. They were what I assume student-centered learning is supposed to be. Students left class that day really happy, and you could tell that they fully enjoyed class.

I conducted a survey at the end of this lesson. Here is a link to the results:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VxlhniHoV6VNF6cgprPqR3xlsgmF41YbmaeEDZ5uNFk/edit#responses. The results are across the board. Most of the students seem ambivalent to this style of teaching/learning.

Not Another Presentation!

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Do you ever feel like both you and your students will explode if you have to listen to one more presentation? Try turning your next set of presentations into a “soap opera” script. Each student must carry on a dialogue with their presentation teammates. The dialogue must be passed from student to student, with each student speaking only a few lines at a time. For example:

Alyssa: Did you know that Henry Ford shortened the work day from 10 to 8 hours while doubling worker’s pay from $2.50 a day to $5.00 a day?
Arianna: He did, but he also make his employees work so hard during those 8 hours a day that many quit after less than a year.
Amaya: Workers could not talk while working. They were not even supposed to smile or take a bathroom break. And they were only given 15 minutes for lunch.
Alyssa: But Ford did provide nice housing for his workers.
Arianna: Nice if you did not mind unscheduled inspections and being forced to going to church every Sunday. Anyone violating Ford’s code of conduct was immediately fired.
Amaya: Not only that, Ford was a racists. He paid African Americans less than whites and he hated Jews.
Alyssa: His new assembly line method produced millions of cars, but was the human cost worth it?

Not only do the students producing the dialogue really enjoy bringing a little drama into the presentation, the audience enjoys not know what is coming next. This is much more interesting than simply stating all the facts.

For assessment I have each presenter create a multiple choice question that engages thinking, not just rote memorization. I create the quizzes in Schoology and the rest of the class takes the quiz after each presentation.

The students enjoy creating and listening to the presentations. The quizzes help engage the audience and provide assessment feedback. All around, this is a great way to learn new material. And, if you want to put a label on this method, it is the jigsaw method of learning.