I decided to look at an educational experience that occured when I was a college student, not when I was teaching (there are not many examples of that). But I think it is relevant because I had to give a presentation to class - in effect teach them about something. Furthermore, this basic lesson design, having the students give in-class presentations, is one that is used very often.
This occured in US history class which I had freshman year at college. Everyone had to do a presentation on a historical figure, and I did Aaron Burr. The presentation didn't go well -it was long and rambling, and I put too much information in, much of which wasn't really important. In 522 we called this coverage. There were some important ideas that I wanted to stress, but they lost in all the other stuff. Furthermore, it consisted of just me talking at the front, apart from a few notes I scribled on the board, there was no visual aids. It wasn't a good presentation for visual learners, or for anyone else for that matter. Most of the other students did better than I did; that was due to being better at public speaking and at editing the information. The presentations were pretty much just someone talking - a few people printed out some outlines, but that was it.
Multimedia could have improved that experience in some many ways. The most obvious way would be use powerpoint with the presentation. This would give visual learners something to do, which is important considering so many people are visual learners. But there are many other possiblilities as well. One idea is that instead of doing a in-class presentation, the students could all do there own wiki sites centered on different historical figures. This allows students to benefit from each other research like they would in a presentation (but not in most homework assignments), but without taking up time in class. Using blogs would probably not be as good a fit as wikis in terms of individual presentations. But having a weekly or monthly blog research activity would be potential idea. Eric Langhorst, the history teacher we looked at last week, uses technology in many ways to teach history - using podcasts among other things. Having students do their own history podcasts would be another alternative. Meanwhile somebody seems to want to do a Wiki for Aaron Burr.
1 comment:
John,
I had a similar experience that I wrote about in my blog concenring an elementary school speech, not a presentation per se. In that we were actually role playing and I was supposed to be John Kennedy. One of the things that we always seem to miss in presentation of all kinds is the opportunity to do dry run rehearsals that are recorded so that we can go back and see and hear ourselves. There are countless refinements and invaluable lessons learned in this simple used of "old-fashioned" multimedia. And today's computer tools make this so much easier with inexpensive and common recording tools--just look at YouTube to see how easy it is. I wish we had these tools when we first did these presentations---I bet we both would have done much better during the formal delivery.
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