Category Archives: Communication

Presenting… Me!

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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!

Decent video sharing is hard to find

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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.

Supporting the cause

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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!

Presenting about presenting

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Taking Your Slide Deck to the Next LevelOn Wednesday I had an opportunity to present to a sub-set of the faculty on some ideas for improving their use of presentation software. It’s been a rub with me that teachers (and administrators – myself included!) have abused slides as the 21st century equivalent of the overhead projector.

Embarrassingly enough, until I started reading and researching about presenting, the only rule of thumb I followed was, “Don’t read directly from the slides.” Although that’s great advice and a wonderful start, it’s only the tip of the iceberg as it relates to creating effective presentations.

The more time I spent at staff development presentations where presenters were telling administrators and teachers about “effective delivery of instruction,” but not practicing what they were preaching, the more frustrated I continued to get. You can’t stand in front of a room full of educators reading your slides bullet-by-bullet and not expect to hear mass snoring.

The most rewarding thing to me was that six of the attendees actually stayed after the presentation with their laptops open and asked me pretty detailed questions about how I designed my slides and how they could improve some of their dated presentations. We ended up hanging out for about a half hour and I am planning to schedule some time to follow up with each of them in their classrooms to maybe watch and provide feedback on their presentations.

  • The PDF (11 MB) – I embellished a little on my presentation notes to make it closer to what I actually said rather than just my outline.
  • The Keynote (12 MB) – The full presentation in Keynote.

Update 12/16/07: Now posted with audio at Slideshare. Enjoy!