Friday, May 18, 2012

Week 6: Engaging Presentations




Week 6 was another week full of treasures in terms of teaching ideas. Before, I thought of PowerPoint as a “One Way Only” presentation application, but, fortunately this old idea has been vanished. I learned that what seemed to be a boring, static, sleep-provoking media can be turned into an inspiring, moving, and motivating tool for engaging students during presentations. The benefits of using PPT in large classes were clearly discussed and we learned a lot from those teachers who deal with populated classrooms. Creating my first interactive presentation was an exciting experience; I learned new features like linkings, Conceptest, jumps, etc. As someone who runs a hybrid course, I need to learn more on how to deliver an interactive slide show for distance learning. PPT fits perfectly well for delivering content and language matters. This week we could also learn about PPT alternatives; for example, I tried an online-delivered presentation using Google Docs and some teachers in my course used Prezi for their purposes. We were fulfilled with the benefits of using such applications and for having learned about 36 interaction strategies.

As for my final project, week 6 represented the implementation phase. So, I have already assigned a small-scale project in which my students will make a recording of their readings using a web-based tool for it. This will be due in one week from today. They have to previously use a listening and speaking application to practice their pronunciation before doing the recording as a way to make comparisons, corrections, and improvements. The final product is the recording itself, but there is a whole process behind this scene. They have also been provided a rubric for self-evaluation; something I learned in this WebSkills training as well. I am very confident that this project will produce good results and my students will finally be able to modulate better English reading pronunciation thanks to technology.

There is a lot to be digested, processed and put into practice from this wonderful course. It will require time and dedication but I am sure we will learn more along the way. There is not destination point in technology training, there are just learning stop-overs in this journey.

3 comments:

  1. Hi teacher nice blog it's very interesting to read

    Edgar Bermudez

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  2. Hi Julio!!

    I have to agree with you 100% about the use of interactive power point presentations for teaching.
    Indeed, the readings showed us a lot of benefits about using interactive ppts and creating one my self was quite an experience. Though I have prepared ppts for our lessons, they never had any pictures and were never interactive. I'm sure this will create quite a stir in my class once I start using it. The boring ppt presentation has now turned into a student centered activity where all have to be on their toes!!

    Cheers!
    Shashinie

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  3. Dear. Julio.
    Just like you, I shed a new light on the conventional version of PPT. I broke the whole perception on a Powerpoint and reverse the idea to the interactive and dynamica way of using it. Week by week, I became a new teacher who could notice new things among our daily English classes. With the help of many colleagues' insights and sharing, I grew up hour by hour as a plant which got regular watering on the fertile soil with the proportionate sun and wind.

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