Category Archives: Technology

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!

Help me help them

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We spent some time this summer going through this, but I need to re-open this can one more time for a presentation I’ve been invited to give to some pre-service teachers who are doing their practicum at our school.

It’s a neat program, really. The college undergrads are on our campus Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7:30 until 11:30 during which time they spend one 90-minute block with a cooperating teacher and the rest of the time in class discussion.

So I’ve been invited to come to the class next Thursday for 90 minutes. The topic the professor would like me to address is, “Lecturing: Must we? Why or why not? How to involve students.”

Just so that I’m completely transparent, I’ll be borrowing liberally from Dan and Merlin and Garr and others. Standing on the shoulders of those who have done such a great job of articulating what it means to present well rather than build a slidedeck that serves as nothing more than enormous version of index cards that help the presenter and not the audience.

I’ll also be borrowing from this Washington Post article.

Now help me out because you never know whether some of these folks will leave Colorado and be looking for jobs in your school or district… What should new teachers know about lecturing?

I’ll happily share the results with you after my – ahem – lecture…