Reflection 4 - Week 5

Exploring PowerPoint, Prezi and Glogster

PowerPoint

I was already familiar with this tool, however there were a few features and functions that I learnt about this week or used for the first time. I explored printing, creating as a PDF, inserting comments and removing these when publishing, editing images and adding notes. I also uploaded to Slideshare and after some experimenting, found that this allows your to 'add in' embedded YouTube videos, when I shared the PP presentation online. All of this play time really helped with brainstorming ideas for how to use this in my teaching, but also for use in class projects and assessment tasks for students. The ability to add narration was of interest, as I think that talking through instructions to students really helps with their understanding of what is required. Also, that having students create, listen and edit their own narration is important for them to gain better understanding of how to improve their scripts and timing within the presentations.

Analysis of PowerPoint

Plus	Minus	Interesting
v  Easy to use v  Presentations are very professional v  Can convey a lot of content v  Good way to plan lessons and include teaching notes v  Most people are familiar v  Students can create projects v  Good way to present content v  Can embed images, photos, video, sound, hyperlinks v  Narration of presentations v  Can create interactive features v  Images can be edited easily v  Can be uploaded and shared to SlideShare and YouTube v  Can encourage structured thinking v  Helps to identify key points	v  Can focus more on content delivery v  Often used for very basic presentations v  Students may not find this challenging or engaging v  Linear nature forces content to be reduced to bullet points v  Can fail to demonstrate complexity of issues v  It is very presenter focused v  If not allowed for, discussion can be constrained	v  Compatibility with Word – overviews v  Collaboration can be incorporated through student group work v  Methods of delivery can have a big impact on engagement and active learning v  Pedagogy is very important if PP presentations effectively encourage higher order and critical thinking

There are real benefits to student learning by having them become comfortable with the daily use of multimedia tools. I can see that creating projects like this, that incorporate real life examples is of interest to students, allows them to express their creativity and will encourage better engagement with the tasks we set them. Thus, to apply this to my teaching area I created my presentation for a Year 10 Business class. Students are required to complete 5 activities and there are opportunities for some of these tasks to make use of a PowerPoint presentation. In fact, students could be scaffolded to explore and incorporate a range of multimedia features within their presentation, including images, sound, video and hyperlinks to external online sources. I have also modelled this application in my presentation.

Buying your first car from Julia Ilott

SAMR: How can PowerPoint can transform learning design?

Redefinition	Technology allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable	As a class, the students create a narrated multimedia PowerPoint presentation about the Australian Economy that includes images, video and hyperlinks. All students collaborate to write the narration, select the content, conduct research, incorporate sound effects, edit video etc. This project will be presented to the students in Business classes from lower grades.
Modification	Technology allows for significant task redesign	Students individually create a PowerPoint presentation about the Australian Economy for their assessment task. All students are to upload their presentation to the class wikispaces site for other students to view and comment on.
Augmentation	Technology acts as direct tool substitute, with functional improvement	Students view a PowerPoint presentation embedded in their class wikispaces site that describes the requirements of an assessment task on the Australian Economy.
Substitution	Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change	Students view a PowerPoint presentation created by the teacher about the Australian Economy in class.

Prezi

This was a new application for me and there were a few features that I really enjoyed:

• The different templates and themes were interesting for seeing how various themes could be used to enhance presentation topics
• The ability to get a general or global overview that was both visual and topical
• How with each click increasing content detail could be added and added to a topic
• It was extremely easy to use - this would make it very appealing for student use
• The use of google image search function within the application - so easy to add pictures!

I actually adapted a medical type heart rate monitor themed template and changed a few things to create a roughly compatible graph type theme to tie in with my Australian Economy content.

 

 

Glogster

For a time, when my boys were little, I enjoyed scrapbooking their baby photos with lots of paper, stickers, frames and art embellishments. So I can understand the appeal of this as a fun online scrapbooking tool, to students who like to make visually appealing projects and showcase their creativity. I did find it a little difficult to manoeuvre through and the controls weren't as intuitive as PowerPoint or Prezi. Probably the most difficult feature I found, was that a description was not provided when you hover over any of the toolbar icons. It was basically a 'try and undo' experiment to figure out what each function was. There are some good opportunities for group work, collaboration, engagement with visual and audio media and enhancing students' skills in the use of technology. Considering that this is now a paid application, I can see that there will be some selective choices to be made as a teacher.