Showing posts with label powerpoint. Show all posts

"From the Old to the New Jim Crow": NCSS presentation (2015)

Thank you for attending our session today at the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) Conference in New Orleans. Please feel free to contact either of us:

Below is an unabridged version of our presentation that you can use in the classroom. It includes strategies for talking to students about race, as well as a full array of statistics on mass incarceration.



For classroom materials and embedded links to multimedia, please click on the image below:


The Justice Project Summit

Dan Lawler and I participated in a presentation/panel discussion called, "Inclusive Schools and Education Equity" in which the following questions were posed:

  1. What does it mean to be a welcoming school district within the constraints of segregated housing patterns? 
  2. What can suburban residents do to effect change in a metropolitan system that sanctions separate and unequal educational opportunities? 
  3. Does diversity in schools create a net gain for all?
GUEST PANELISTS:
  • Dan Lawler and Spiro Bolos, New Trier's Metropolitan Community Project
  • Steve Bogira, The Chicago Reader
  • Kourtney Cockrell, Student Enrichment Services at Northwestern University

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!


A Presentation About Presentations

I was lucky to travel west to present at the largest educational technology conference (west of the Mississippi) in Palm Springs. It's called CUE (Computer-Using Educators). While I had rehearsed and near-obsessively sweated the details of my session room, it was affirming to see that I was not the only one who put in such thought into presenting in front of others. Mark Standley, an author and Alaskan educator, gave a remarkable talk entitled "The Art of Digital Presentations", in which he skillfully measured and then responded to the energy level of his audience in real-time. It was fun but a little unnerving to observe the "meta" aspect of delivering a presentation about what makes a great presentation.

Standley correctly stated the danger of (mis-)using PowerPoint: "Too often the technology becomes the presentation and the speaker's voice, message, and ideas are secondary." Though many of his ideas were deceptively simple and seemingly subtle, I would argue that these small pieces of advice (selection featured below) add up to a much more engaging and enriching experience for both presenter and audience.
  • Provide handouts. Because half of your audience will be uncomfortable without them.
  • Remember that adults like to talk to each other. Provide opportunities for that to happen.
  • The average "wait-time" is about 4 seconds. But the average wait-time should be 11 seconds.
  • Choose two "anchor-points" on the floor when speaking in front of an audience. Avoid mimicking the "caged tiger" on a stage and don't hesitate to join your audience physically as a fellow learner.
There were many other ideas offered which you can see on his website, but I found the most surprising part of his talk was about credibility: according to Standley, the most believed piece of information is from an overheard conversation. If that's true, it might explain why so many commercials feature "hidden camera" testimonials! Most importantly, it should give presenters a more realistic sense of the challenge of being the sole "expert" of the room. Don't be afraid to tap the knowledge of your audience.


Jigsaw: the Shared Presentation

One of the most powerful classroom activities I have recently rediscovered is the jigsaw. Here is an example of where technology can make something better than it was in the past. As my students are able to view each others' work -- in progress -- the overall quality of the final product (as a sum of the individual parts) inevitably increases.

For example, I recently had my Modern World History students redesign an old PowerPoint (link to assignment) I made using VoiceThread as the collaboration tool. Here's what the old PowerPoint presentation looked like:



Using the "Lessig Method" of design (minimal text, symbolic images), students were responsible for redesigning a portion of the PPT (PowerPoint), and then annotating (either with speech balloons or their actual voices) the new slides with the words used by the speaker. Although my students were frustrated with the lack of design control in VoiceThread, I believe the project was an overall success. My students better absorbed the content, but also learned how to clearly communicate in the visual realm. Here's what the revised presentation looks like, collaboratively designed by 26 sophomores:


In the future, I would have the students first design their slides using Google Presentations, then upload the completed PPT into VoiceThread for annotation purposes. Having now used both tools, my students preferred the design flexibility of the former.


PowerPoint KILLS — The Presentation

For those of you who attended my talk on designing more effective PowerPoint presentations, here is a copy of the slides, recently featured on the homepage of SlideShare.net:

"You are a Presentation SuperStar on SlideShare!

Your presentation is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.

We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday.
"

I've also included (below) many links to the sites mentioned during the session:

RESEARCH
EXEMPLARS
DESIGN GUIDES
IMAGE SOURCES

And finally, here is an outstanding example of a student presentation from Julia Barrow, who worked with me on an independent study project. Using the techniques outlined above, Julia designed these slides and recorded a voice-over synced with the images. Wow!


Embed a YouTube Video in PowerPoint

Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...>Image via CrunchBase As a Technology Staff Developer (TSD), placing a YouTube video into a PowerPoint presentation is easily one of the most requested "how-to"s I hear from fellow teachers. And unfortunately for Windows users, it's not a straightforward process, by any stretch. But I will show you THREE proven methods that I have used again and again. Since our school has switched to Microsoft Office 2007, these techniques apply only to that version of PowerPoint.



METHOD 1
Embed a reference to a YouTube video without actually downloading the video. This method will only work if you have a live and robust internet connection. Otherwise, you're out of luck. I can't take credit for this method: I found it on YouTube, and the creator/narrator is a woman named Laura Bergelis, who seems to know a lot about presentations and technology. You might enjoy reading many more tips at her website, Maniactive.




METHOD 2
Download a special extension ONCE to install into PowerPoint. Click on this link to see a pop-up video: *YouTube into PPT*  NOTE: if you'd like to share the presentation with others, make sure you save it as a "macro-enabled" Powerpoint presentation. It will actually work for people who don't have the extension installed.



METHOD 3
OR, you can actually download a YouTube video and embed it in your PowerPoint presentation. This method might take a little bit longer, but will result in a PowerPoint that will play regardless of whether you have access to the internet.

  • Download your video using a website called Mediaconverter. Just paste the video's url (eg., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMJuy0JIyVA) into the "conversion wizard" where it says, "Convert a video or music by url"
  • Choose the file type to convert to: WMV
  • Click through the next steps without changing any settings
  • Once that's done, click "DOWNLOAD NOW" and make sure you remember where you saved the file.
  • Open PowerPoint. Click the INSERT tab, then the MOVIE button, and choose your downloaded video. That's about it!






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NECC: PowerPoint Kills

Microsoft PowerPoint (Mac OS X)>Image via WikipediaI was fortunate to attend a one-hour presentation by Glenbrook South's own David Jakes, a practitioner of what he preaches! What follows is a short paraphrase of his talk:

Certainly one of the earliest (1987) of the technological democratizers was Microsoft's PowerPoint. We all know how easily it could add a professional sheen to anyone's presentation -- just by using the templates. But we also have sadly discovered that PowerPoint kills. Instead of being used to support a speaker, it has, in many ways begun to supplant the presenter simply because too many of its users treat the program "like a TelePrompTer". In lieu of rehashing his 10 suggestions, I'll embed them below. Jakes was generous enough to distribute his entire presentation online for free.


Jakes' style was similar to that of Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, who is my personal model for presentations I plan to give during the school year. Both presenters shun the use of templates and bullet points, and radically limit the amount of text on the screen, since the audience can always read it faster than you can say it. For links and more on Lessig and other styles of presentation, click on the presentation link (tag) in the left-hand column of this blog (under "my del.icio.us tags").

But the most important point that Jakes implied was how crucial it is that we model and teach these techniques to our students. Too often, he argues, we give our students the technological tools without the training they need to use them responsibly. As he humorously observed, "PowerPoint doesn't kill; bullet points do."


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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

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