1. “Missing the launch window.” Your kid is tired, but somehow you didn’t get her down to bed at the prime “falling-asleep” time. Now you’re left with a cranky kid who is tired but can’t or won’t go to sleep. This is not to be confused with…
2. “Scrubbed launch.” You thought the kid was tired, but attempting to put her down for a nap resulted in her getting a “second-wind” of some kind.

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:

• Get your audience involved bing, bang, bing. Everyone made a head band out of the paper they passed around before the show. No one balked. Some got really creative. We all got involved and the positive energy – read: party – started. They pre-sold fun!
• Design your presentation so that even your least interesting material is still compelling and fun.
• Start and end with a bang. Drums are good though other options exist.
• Be unique. Playing the drums is pleasant. Playing the drums while dressed in blue paint, with vibrantly colored water sloshing with every beat, is fun, funny and unique.

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]

Uploaded with Skitch!

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.