I think the article Best Practices in Presenting with PowerPoint - from the UO's Teaching Effectiveness Program offers excellent tips for making effective and truly interactive power point presentations. The interactive ppt sample is great too.
Reflecting on this topic has made me realize two things. First, I cannot recall using ppt in my classes when I was teaching. Fostering interactivity was a must, of course, but the most common technological resources we used were audio, videos, movie segments, useful websites and CD-ROMs. Second, nowadays our students are taught how to make good oral presentations and required to make one at the Advanced level and even in more depth at the Alianza Teaching Program. Student-teachers need to make a professional oral presentation to graduate as teachers. However, I think that we could explore the possibility to incorporate well-planned ppts to our teaching practices as a way to add variety and enhance interactivity at the intermediate and even high-basic levels as well.
The tips presented in the different articles can also be transferred to the presentations I do have to make for student-teachers or colleagues as a coordinator either in power point or Prezi, which is the current trend at the Alianza nowadays. I always plan them in a way that would allow for some interactivity, even if they are not workshops. To achieve this, I have used some of the techniques mentioned by Deborah Healey such as a quick quiz to activate the audience’s schema, concept tests such as true or false, short answer, matching, multiple choice, etc, at different moments to wrap up different sections of the presentation, and Think,Pair,Share. However, it was great to read about the blank slide technique to refocus attention onto the speaker and for discussion and the interpreted lecture, which implies having a member of the audience paraphrase a concept in his or her own words.
Last but not least, I loved the tips of using power point as an organizer with word and excel documents open in our PC as a hyperlink, enriching ppts with audio and video files and making non-linear ppts. Moving back or forward to different elements or websites according to the result of the interaction that is taking place will definitely make our presentation much more dynamic and centered on the audience’s needs.
Margarita
Dear Margarita,
ReplyDeleteI do agree with your idea of exploring possibility to incorporate well-planned PPT to our teaching practices as a way to add variety and enhance interactivity. Last week, I tried out my PPT with students and I realized that I have to prepare well before using it in class. When my PPT slides were on the screen, the texts were not as clear as they were on my computer screen. The color and certain font styles do not match when transferred through LCD projector.
Making non-linear PPT is also interesting but I haven’t tried it yet due to the time constraint. I think this would be useful if we design and consider it as students’ out-of-class assignment.
Best,
Moo