Week 12 - Student Presentations: Becca, Charita, and Joe

Tonight's presentation was a virtual smorgasbord of tips, tricks, and tools. Each presentation left me thinking how I could use the teachings in one or more of the multiple projects I'm currently working on. I'll admit my head is swimming a bit; partially from all the material that was covered but mostly because of  its potent potentiality.

Becca started us off with a presentation software named NearPod that lets you easily create highly engaging presentations with drag and drop widgets, and  has a feature where you and the student can get near instant quiz results data. Charita then lead us into Pinterest and showed us how easy it is to link our Pinterest account to our Yola sites. And Joe finished us off with two types of YouTube modification software, previously unknown features of Google Forms, and some tips and tricks for Google Chrome.
And yes, I do mean finished us off.

Becca started her presentation by telling us how she was introduced to the NearPod presentation software last year as a student teacher and was immediately drawn to the software due to its interactive features. Becca shared that n the Upper New York school where she taught, the students needed to share ipads, and she found  NearPod allowed for great group collaborations. I thought sharing some personal background was a good way to start the presentation.

Charita opened up her very visually stimulating presentation with a nice explanation of her agenda. I thought the agenda was well thought through and took in to account what concerns a new user of Pinterest would want, and need, to know to get started. Charita also included multiple functions that even seasoned Pinners were unaware existed. I really liked the idea of creating a board for my Yola account for both the visual appeal but also because I could pin an article that had an active link and shift the storage off my Yola site and onto the Pinterest site.

Joe used a PowerPoint presentation with active links to keep track on his material and to provide instructions to us on how to use the 2 software programs he introduced. Joe added numbers and arrows, in red, to be sure the audience had the directions easily accessible. I thought that showed that he wanted to ensure students' success and was a nice touch. One of the software programs, ViewPure, allows you to take a YouTube video and have it cleaned of all the ads and comments and provides you with a URL. Joe felt this was useful information he took away from the Google Summit Conference he attended that could help teachers without Internet access or whose school blocked YouTube. I will use the tools when creating Ebooks.

One important reminder that I've come away with after watching the other students' presentations is to allow for the unexpected when presenting, whether you're presenting face to face or on-line.
You can have technical difficulties; more questions than you expected; a student that needs extra help; or .....more technical difficulties. All good plans contain contingencies.

So, so far I have been reminded to do a timed mock run through of the presentation and to allow time for the possibility of an unexpected problem. I don't like to rush at the end of a presentation to cover necessary material; the listener always knows. And because it all could run smoothly, I will plan an exercise to fill the time I allotted for any unexpected problems.

Yes indeed, slow and steady wins the race.