Coming into this class, I was looking forward to learning some new tools for presenting in my class, and to get my students presenting to each other in new ways. After doing some looking at Presentation Zen, though, this may be more of a philosophical shift than I thought.
I had heard before that Power Point slides should be minimal, and I've had to sit through absolutely painful presentations where slides were filled to capacity with text, which the speaker would just read verbatim. The last time I saw one of these was at an RtI conference in Green Bay. It was an 90-minute presentation with a break at the halfway point. Once they announced the break, they said they would give free books to whoever actually came back. I considered trying to steal a book, but there was zero chance I was going back into the soul-sucking pit of a presentation. I left wondering, "If you know your presentation is so terrible that you have to bribe people to come back, why not just change it?"
I try really hard not to duplicate that in my classroom. I did find, much to my surprise, that I fell into that trap a fair bit. When discussing grammatical terms, I would have the definition up there, and I would read that exact same definition. Then we would roll through a bunch of examples so they could practice. This is where the shift has to come for me, and where I'm nervous about changing. I understand it's boring to see text and hear the same thing, because we read faster than we talk. What makes me nervous is that not all my kids pay attention all the time. (I think it's pretty close to 100% though. Right? Right?!) I feel understanding the role of different parts of speech is important, so I make sure it's up there. That way, if they aren't listening when I talk about it, when they finally snap back to attention, there it is for them. If my presentation just showed images and minimal text to support examples, like a cartoon adjective pointing to a cartoon noun, those zoning-out students might not understand what it means. Maybe they would get the impression that an adjective is always the word right before a noun. And then how would they ever contribute to society?
I understand that maybe if my presentations were a little better, I'd have fewer students zoning out, but that's just going to happen no matter what with middle schoolers. What I have to strive for is a balance between education and entertainment, because the second can easily lead to the first.
I agree entertainment can lead to more students paying attention as well as better understanding, but I also don't feel like we should always have to entertain our kids! I also do some power points, but mostly I use SmartNotebook with my Smartboard to show my lessons. I work hard to try to do some of the tricks with the smartboard (like hide and reveal or pop a balloon to get an answer), but it takes a lot of time on my part to make all lessons that engaging. I am also hoping I will learn new ways to present information through digital storytelling. I have never done them before and they look like something the kids will really like, but also a lot of work.
ReplyDeleteI am not totally sold on the research that says we don't learn from seeing and hearing the same thing just yet. Like you said, you're not sure if the kids are paying attention. Wouldn't it be like having a backup plan if you had it on the screen, in print, in addition to talking about it? Wouldn't it be easier for kids to take notes if they didn't have to rely on writing it down right as it came out of your mouth? I guess that's where handouts come into play but 1)You'd have to have time to create these handouts and more importantly 2)You'd have to believe that the students would actually follow along and refer to the handout. Adults at the professional level could be expected to use a handout efficiently but how about a middle school kid? I'm not so sure.
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