Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts

"Making the Mundane Beautiful": professional development presentation

Thanks to everyone who attended our session. I will upload the entire slidedeck as well as links to the apps and websites mentioned.

Please make sure you contribute a photo to our "Making the Mundane Beautiful" #atwarwiththeobvious social slideshow HERE.

For now, here is the original slidedeck as presented to my American Studies students:



If you'd like to learn more about the photographic artists featured in the presentation, here are links to Todd Hido and William Eggleston via ASX: American Suburb X (CAUTION: may be classified NSFW).

"A Lighthouse": Opening Day Speech (2015)

For my "Opening Day" speech (as President of the New Trier Education Association), I chose to focus on the theme of race, and I used a publishing platform called "Medium" (iOS app available) because of the beautiful balance it affords between multimedia and text. See the original slidedeck here.

A Lighthouse

Technology Integration Presentation at Lake Forest College

Thank you for participating in today's session. Below is an embedded slideshare of the presentation.


Technology Integration in Instruction from Spiro Bolos

Please see the sidebar, "My Other Sites" for links to my school-related blogs.

Presenting Tweets in Chronological Order: A Challenge

For my visit to Smiley and West's The Poverty Tour 2.0 in Alexandria, Virginia, I wanted to document the event for my students and others by using Twitter to broadcast and archive memorable quotes from the hosts and guest speakers.

But finding a site that allowed tweets to be viewed in chronological order proved to be a major challenge until I stumbled upon this function within Storify. For now, the quotes alone will suffice, but I want to learn how to add different forms of media to enrich this "presentation". Check it out below:

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Students

Thanks to my wonderful sophomore students, I had an opportunity to present, discuss, and solicit feedback regarding my take on Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Because in the future I am only allotted 50 minutes to present and respond to questions, I've taken my students' feedback and eliminated about 1/3 of the slides. Below appears the unabridged slide deck, including the 2 videos I played when I presented. Enjoy.




District 219 Tech Conference

Thanks to all who attended my breakout sessions at the District 219 Tech Conference, which was conducted under the themes of "1:1 and Web 2.0" on April 9th, 2011 at Niles North High School in Skokie, Illinois. Please feel free to contact me for further information (located in the right sidebar):

For those of you who attended my Blogging session, here is a link that features some of the best student- and teacher-related blog information I have found on the web. I tried to keep the amount of links to a minimum to encourage usage. However, if these are not enough, I have tagged over 200 web pages with the term, "blog", on this site.

The main blogs I author are also linked below:

  1. "An American Studies": co-authored with John S. O'Connor, my English teaching partner. It features links to all (40+) of our students' individual blogs.
  2. "Modern World History": a class I taught in the past which used a different blogging platform called Posthaven, somewhat similar to Tumblr. It allows you to post just about anything via email.
  3. "US History": a class I currently teach in an experimental classroom, it also uses the Posthaven platform instead of Blogger, my traditional favorite.
For those of you who attended my Copyright and Fair Use session here are some more resources:
Thanks for visiting!


Making Thinking Visible with the Shared Presentation

There's nothing quite so intimidating to students as delivering an oral presentation in front of their peers. And unfortunately, many students use the opportunity to turn their slides into text-heavy TelePrompTer screens. This might be due to the fact that the students are merely imitating what they see daily in the classroom: how many of us have subjected our classes to bullet point after bullet point, in an attempt to convey as much content as possible in the shortest period of time?

What I have tried to do is provide my students with training on how to communicate effectively, both orally and visually. But I also want to lower their performance anxiety. This is accomplished by sharing the presentation duties: one slide, one student, in a co-created Google Docs presentation. An added bonus was that the students could see each other's work during the creation process, thus upping the overall quality.

Finally, my greatest hope was that they would critically examine the choices they  made, in what and how they communicated. Ron Ritchhart, in his Intellectual Character, emphasizes the need for "Routines for Discussing and Exploring Ideas" in establishing an intellectual environment (94). One example is "The Why Routine". In the assignment featured below, students were asked to provide the following for a historical mock trial (on the subject of the Boston Massacre):

  1. Find an image that you believe represents your witness or their testimony in some way. You should be creative here as long as YOU can explain why you think it is representative of your witness.
  2. Choose ONE quote that either helps or hurts the Defendant, depending on whether your witness is on the side of the Prosecution or the Defense. Why is it the best quote?



Although the above finished product lacks student voices, the key to this activity was the oral presentation itself. Each time a student presented their individual slide, I asked them WHY they made the particular choices. It was illuminating as they were "making thinking visible": everyone else in the classroom understood the importance of providing a rationale for choices of images and quotes. As you can see, some ideas worked better than others!


Using Bloom's to Reflect

There's been a lot of hype over the zooming presentation tool, Prezi, which allows the creator to design the presentation in a non-linear way. I have to say I've been reluctant to embrace this particular design method because it seems to have a relatively steep learning curve (at least 15 minutes), especially when compared to something like VoiceThread, which can literally be taught to another person in a couple minutes or so.

Once you learn the basic principles of Prezi, I find that one then spends an inordinate amount of time tweaking the layout just so its amazing twists! turns! and zooms! work in the most aesthetically pleasing way. It doesn't seem to me to be a tool that emphasizes the all-important goal of clarity of communication over bells and whistles. Though it's arguably an engaging tool, I haven't seen how using it as a PowerPoint substitute makes it a transformational tool — yet.

However, that doesn't mean there aren't decent examples of Prezi out there. Check out this short presentation by Peter Pappas, who takes a great idea — reflecting on every level of Bloom's Taxonomy — and augments it with clear, concise examples and embedded videos in order to provide a model of professional development for schools.




Disclaimer

Although this blog is authored by New Trier High School (NTHS) staff, the audience is global and the views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of NTHS as an institution.

Copyright and Fair Use

This site contains images and excerpts the use of which have not been pre-authorized. This material is made available for the purpose of analysis and critique, as well as to advance the understanding of technology in education. 
The ‘fair use’ of such material is provided for under U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with U.S. Code Title 17, Section 107, material on this site (along with credit links and/or attributions to original sources) is viewable for educational and intellectual purposes. 
If you are interested in using any copyrighted material from this site for any reason that goes beyond ‘fair use,’ you must first obtain permission from the copyright owner.