I recently gave an iPad training for a school that has teachers with iPads. One of the tools I showed them was zapd, an iPhone app, that creates simple web sites. To this group of teacher, some of whom are relatively new to iOS, this was a really fun and interesting app for them to play with. In the interest of using he tools, I created my presentation for the morning using zapd. It served as a great holding place for links, pictures that went with stories and text boxes with assignments.
Today I did a presentation entitled Creating A Culture Of Learning. The slides should be posted below. I thought it went well. If you look at the slides you find that I tried to set up a situation where I grounded some of our initiatives in a theory I am working through called conditions of the 21st century. I hate the buzzword, but I think there are some things that are different and am trying to base some of the things that we have found successful in the changing landscape to the world. I will gladly talk to anyone about the presentation, leave a comment. If you were at the presentation and have not already please leave me some feedback, either in the comments here or in the form. Also, if you were there I gathered a lot of other ideas about conditions of the 21st century from you and the link timed out and I lost them, so if you remember yours add it to the comments here. Thanks a ton. There are a lot of links in the presentation and I think that Slideshare.net maintains those.http://www.slideshare.net/weathertation/creating-a-culture-of-learning
I got this question from a teacher today and thought it would make a great post as well.
Hi Jim!I'm hoping you can help us out...Our MS (6-7-8) Spanish team is already planning the final project for our students. We would like students to work in pairs or individually to create a presentation (think Power Point or Keynote) about a Spanish speaking country. Then, we want students to upload their presentations to a Posterous site so they can view their classmates presentations.Lately, I've been working with the Google Docs version of Power Point. I LOVE it because the presentations are SO easy to embed into blogs (Example: http://hollandchristianfles.blogspot.com/2010/03/san-antonio.html)Most of the students are used to working with Keynote, but when you upload a Keynote to Posterous, you just get the file that you have to download. Here's my question...Is there a way to "embed" a Keynote on Posterous? (Sort of like how the Google Presentation embeds)? I know one "easy" solution would be to have all students create a Google account and use Google docs, but 6th and 7th grade students aren't 13...so I don't think they can create accounts.
You are right about Google Docs presentation being really sweet, but I too have shied away from doing real work with it because of the inherent limitation of a web based software that I might want to put a lot of pictures and video in. I see a couple of options for you. I had the same question recently and these are the solutions that I ran across. There are links to examples of each.
Hi Jim!I'm hoping you can help us out...Our MS (6-7-8) Spanish team is already planning the final project for our students. We would like students to work in pairs or individually to create a presentation (think Power Point or Keynote) about a Spanish speaking country. Then, we want students to upload their presentations to a Posterous site so they can view their classmates presentations.Lately, I've been working with the Google Docs version of Power Point. I LOVE it because the presentations are SO easy to embed into blogs (Example: http://hollandchristianfles.blogspot.com/2010/03/san-antonio.html)Most of the students are used to working with Keynote, but when you upload a Keynote to Posterous, you just get the file that you have to download. Here's my question...Is there a way to "embed" a Keynote on Posterous? (Sort of like how the Google Presentation embeds)? I know one "easy" solution would be to have all students create a Google account and use Google docs, but 6th and 7th grade students aren't 13...so I don't think they can create accounts.
- Export the Keynote as ppt. Posterous will display this, but movies and audio do not come through and I do not really like the format very much (very slow loading). This same thing would happen if you used OpenOffice.org to make the presentations and sent those to Posterous.
- You can export the Keynote as images and send them all to Posterous. If you export them to a folder, right click on the folder and choose Compress from the menu. Then just attach that zip file to the email to Posterous and Posterous turns it into a very nice gallery. The pictures display in order and can be clicked on really easily. You still do not get audio or video. I think this actually turned out the nicest of all the options I tried when getting read for my MACUL presentation.
- Export from Keynote as a Quicktime. You get all the audio and video. You will have to be incredibly careful about length and presentation size. I was not careful about these things and could not upload mine this way.
- Create the blogs on the school blog server. Keynotes upload to it and show up great.
- You could use Voicethread.com. The free accounts are pretty limited, 25MB, so if there is any audio or video you will probably go over.
- You could use slideshare.com. No audio or video with a 100 MB upload limit. They take Keynotes directly.
Title
My laptop has a webcam, now what?
Actual Title
So many teachers and student use these things around here, I wonder if other people need to know the power?
or
It was the catchiest title I could come up with and I am working on a theory that catchy titles are the key to presenting.
Presenter
Me.
Presentation
See attached photos of slides. They will not be of much value since they each need the story and the slides do not have video. Sorry no audio. I wish I had the ability to remember to record myself at these things.
Reflection
I love presenting. It forces me to reflect on my teaching and tech coordinating and bring out in front of people what good is happening around me. I tried out two specific new things this year that I think may have helped.
First, I spent a lot of time on my title. It may not seem like it but I did. The title above is the best I have ever had. I liked that it was current: many PC people are new to having a webcam. I liked that there was no mistaking what the presentation was going to be about. I thought it communicated that there would be stuff in here to try out on Monday (a way teachers often decide what to do at conferences) while I knew I would get at picture theories of education during the whole thing. I wanted more than my current average at MACUL of 15 people in the room.
Second, I think I realized that there are three tiers of presenting at conferences. First tier is the true story tellers with a big philosophical point. Dan Meyer, Alan November, Will Richardson, David Warlick, Gary Stager all weave stories and presentations to make you think big thoughts. Second tier presenters show you a lot of things that you can do and try to weaver their big picture stuff into that. I think this is second tier because I might only get a few nuggets out and I will probably have to find them myself a little. Plus it is easier to make these presentations. Line up 25 good ideas and go. There is another tier but I would like to stay positive.
If you look at the slides, my presentation was essentially 21 good ideas about using webcams. I weaved through that some good rules of teaching, and how to use other devices than webcams that you may have around to achieve some of the same goals. I was really happy with how it came together.
I think my title worked. I had about 50 or 75 people at the presentation. The room was pretty big, so it was not full, but close. Aside from my title I was in the room that on the program had me right below all the headliners. That probably helped. The room I was in was literally the farthest room from anything, which might have hurt. I was very happy with the turnout. And I think no one left, which is another good sign for my title. I got a lot of positive feedback from the people who stayed after as well.
I could do some things better.
- I need to put my slides up before the show so that my sharetabs.com link includes a link to the slides.
- I need to make my sharetabs.com before the morning of the event.
- I need to be ready to present 20 minutes early so I can greet them at the the door. By ten minutes left when I was ready to meet people at the door the room was half full. By the way, greeting people at the door is an essential and under utilized presentation technique.
- I should consider the whole presentation being websites, although with all the videos that are of unknown copy write status, I really could not.
- I should have short Google Form for evaluation that people can go to for feedback.
Overall I was really happy. The audience really tracked and seemed to enjoy it. I was very comfortable. I am glad MACUL sees fit to continue to allow me to present. Now I just have to think of a topic.
