Experiencing Group - Serve up Some Prezi

Oh presentations, those wonderful detailed reports done with sweaty palms, stuttering voices and hopes and prayers completed in full public view. As a teacher, this is your life, your passion. Presentations become routine and far less important as an act than as a source of information; a skill of "second nature" if you will; even if the nervous energy doesn't necessarily disappear in all situations regardless of how experienced you become.

The basis for any good presentation is the research of the information behind its content, and what better way to come upon the gold mine than to allow the old adage "many hands make light work" to come to fruition. During our latest group presentation I found our subject to be the very theme of the entire product of our research into the question of classroom collaboration. Practicing what we preached went exactly as we had hoped.

Fitted with a group of individuals that were willing to participate and were dedicated to the success of the final product I found myself relatively relieved that my very weakness in writing would be helped along by those who were experienced in it. Research papers have never been my strong suit, try as I may, so to have others fill in that gap and be able to be helpful with the skills I did possess was the best of both worlds. While I did feel a little guilty about leaving the three of them to do the research writing on their own as far as content, when it finally came time to edit and give the three of them a framework and uniform voice for all their hard work I was more than willing to be able to contribute my own skills into the project. A thesis, a smooth paper voice, and opening and conclusion paragraphs to frame their beautifully done content proved to be more work than I imagined, but I was happy to do it.

Overall our project was a big success. We produced a collaborative research paper in which everyone was a participant despite busy schedules and varying distance from campus; a very well-designed Prezi presentation aide; and a verbal class presentation that had an expert in each sub focus area of the paper to present it fully and with good knowledge of the content. A very good result that comes from working with a great group of individuals.

Source of the Day:

A good example video of collaboration at work with fellow teachers. Though it might feel a bit forced at first, the examples they show of the benefits of working in a group together to support both student and teacher alike is a great example of how collaboration can begin to work at its finest!






 Google SketchUp:  A great (and free!) downloadable program from Google. This program allows the building of 3-D shapes on the computer by pushing, pulling, dragging and manipulating your way through the process. This is a simplified geometric drafting program that just about anyone can use, and the online video and text tutorials can fill in the rest of the knowledge gaps. 

This program tends to come in very handy in the art education classroom as a way to teach students perspective. Each student learns the basics of using the program and then designs a house to their liking out of the simplified shapes. These are then printed out for the students to use as a guide to reproduce their buildings on a separate sheet of paper using rulers, pencils, and vanishing points.


A very important aide to teach a very difficult concept for younger students.

Powerpoint ( omg. X_x )

Welcome back fellow captured audience members! I must admit I write this with a very scattered mind (hence the absurdly late post) due to my mother's double knee replacement surgery on Monday. It took up most of the wiggle room in an already packed attention span. Please forgive any tangents and/or evidence of brain absence in the following post as they are more than bound to happen. Though for now, on to the good stuff!

How a typical college class PowerPoints ends.

PowerPoint is the subject of the day. A program which almost makes a pointed reminiscent daily reminder of Ferris Bueller's poor friends left behind during his 24 hour vacation. The college professors we undergo these days being key examples. I myself endure 4 hours of passive PowerPoint presentation every day I have class, 2 hours in Meteorology, and 2 allotted for Geology. Time in and time out with utter consistency I sit and watch as slides go by and take my notes. No matter how interesting I find the professors or the information I still find myself toying with my attention span and utterly forcing myself to be attentive to what I'm doing. I'm paying these people something along the lines of $80.00 an hour. I want to get my money's worth to make them work for it.

That however is not the stance of your typical grade school student. They aren't paying to be there. They're young enough that most of them don't understand the value, and those that do have yet to maturely catch up to the full impact of what an education means. To them, a PowerPoint pretty much  means boring lecture, rapid note taking, and hand cramps.

In this project we set out to change all that. Using the Pennsylvania SAS website to pick a favorite standard to focus a mini-lesson around for a new type of PowerPoint project. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, an INTERACTIVE lesson using PowerPoint! (Someone is going to forward this to my college professors right?)

For my particular project, I chose to enlighten and challenge a classroom of 12th grade art history students to compare and contrast several famous works from four different art movements. The catch was for them to do this as self-exploration and independent study. How would you do this on PowerPoint you ask? Not anywhere near quickly, but relatively simply. After creating a main PowerPoint that outlined the expectations of the project I included links to several other PowerPoints that I created, one for each of the artwork pieces I had selected. Within these I included a downloadable worksheet each student was to print out and complete as they moved through the slides to explore specific website links and embedded videos that I wanted them to explore and read through.

Although I loved the idea that you can think out of the box on simple programs like PowerPoint, the very process was grueling and labor-intensive. I would much rather build a website on flash or a free server for my students to go through than try and fidget with attempting to settle a square peg in a round hole. It can certainly be useful and beneficial, but it'll take a bit of sandpaper and a handsaw before you get a product to go through.

It was however very gratifying to see and be able to present our final products to our small groups. The results and hard work showed, making it all the more rewarding despite the frustrations.


Source of the Day

Audience Response Systems - Welcome to my dream. Well, one of them. Have you ever seen a television show that has the audience take a poll and their results are automatically put up on the screen for all to see? Take that image, and apply your imagination to polling your students on that question you just asked about President Washington or the formation of a continent. How many students have to think about that answer before they move on? ALL of them. The video below is a promotion for a specific company selling this product, but it gives a VERY good idea to what you can do with it as an educator. I'm certain it will make you drool just like it did me.