Prezi – used well

“Teaching outside the Box” Prezi

I spent a couple of hours learning to use Prezi to make a more visually exciting presentation a few months ago. I found it hard to get right, but once mastered not too bad. Ok, the main idea was to avoid a PowerPoint style bullet listed pages and inspire the audience with more creative structures of presentation. When done well, as the example above, Prezi adds more than just style to a presentation. After all, it isn’t as labour intensive as Flash!

Issues I did experience were that even when familiar with the content, during a presentation it was easy to get lost and have to back track to another part of the ‘show’. I ended up printing out slides using PowerPoint (!!!) through screen shots of Prezi. When other people had to present the same show they had no idea how to navigate around and again needed the slide print outs!

Is Prezi any good? Yes, for making easy multimedia in the style of Flash and not so linear as PowerPoint. No, if you have to present (or someone else does) to 120 people once a day for a week. Instead, post online and send them a link! Prezi – time to add a voiceover and video capture feature – maybe people would pay a premium for these features?

How will e-learning improve the way I teach?

A fairly recent DfES Report (2003) concluded that the benefits of e-leaning tools were to enable experimental pedagogy in the classroom. Is that really why edtech teachers want to try new Web 2.0 type tools? Is there a myriad of reasons for using emerging technologies – beneficial to the teacher and learner and most of all to the teaching and learning that takes place. Secondly, I wanted to know how e-learning tools improve the way that teachers teach. So I set a little poll for the 500 or so teachers in my PLN on Twitter.

I picked out the top benefits to teaching I could think of and included a space for teachers to add their own reasons. Crucially, I included a more than one answer too as something requested from a previous poll I tried.

This accounted for just 5% of the vote and actually includes one of the main responses. Interestingly, 24/7 availability was important to one of the respondents.

More or less an even split between engaging and inspiring and including more than one of the other answers. There are many benefits of e-learning tools; not just to try new methods of teaching but also to inspire our learners showing that we can also push ourselves out of our comfort zones as they do daily. Some great debate started too!

Fascinating reading! Thanks to everyone who took part.

Posterous for Learning & Teaching

 

Check out my Posterous blog web site – this has got to be the easiest method to read/write the web ever – EVER. No kidding; all you have to do is make sure you have an online email client (gmail preferred) and send emails plus attachments. That’s it – the web site is written by ever email posting you make.

I have now taken 3 sessions of science, maths and GTP teachers through the basics of Posterous and added a bit of value in terms of additional web 2.0 tools like Wallwisher and Voicethread. Ok, it’s note everyone’s taste – I accept that but I can certainly vouch for student responses. Try setting a read and discover homework on a topic of your choosing. Will you expect 3 or 5 bullets of info back? Maybe half a page with an illustration? Then try showing your students a Posterous blog and tell them you want a weekly posting with an image or Powerpoint embedded and ok try Voicethread or Wallwisher too. Guaranteed engagement!

The key to using tools like these is the emphasis on the learning rather than just the teaching – ok, not Masters level writing but certainly enthusiasm beyond that for the topic you love.

Online collaboration

I have been giving some thought to online collaboration tools. I have used Skype for a while as a communication tool and have shared documents between small groups in Google docs. Working with Colin at Uni, we wanted an integrated approach.

So Colin and I agreed to work online collaboratively every Wednesday evening from 8 to 9 pm. We initially started using Skype (tested during Day 1), however, audio can be a bit hit and miss at times depending on the network and your physical site of your computer. Colin, I believe was in a public library! Consequently, he set up and sent me the link today to his Groundwork trust ning social site… this worked really well and we were able to share our progress, ideas, resource files and even slides. Read through our Forum commentary here. Suitably impressed by Colin’s ning site, I have created one for my work colleagues, although it may be difficult to tear them away from Facebook.
Explore Colin’s ning social site at: http://groundworklearners.ning.com/

Interesting that others’ sites were done in pbwiki and wetpaint. Room for some more discovery research here.

Classroom 2.0 for educators

This is the award-winning social networking site for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education. Themes include:

• Blogging (”blogging”)
• Calendars (”calendars”)
• Collaborative Documents(”documents”)
• Collaborative Idea Maps(”ideamaps”)
• Collaborative Spreadsheets(”spreadsheets”)
• Course Management (”cms”)
• Gaming (”gaming”)
• Google Earth (”gearth”)
• Interactive Boards (”iboards”)
• Instant Messaging (”im”)
• Internet Telephony (”telephony”)
• Mapping (”maps”)
• Microblogging (”microblogging”)
• Online Meetings (”meetings”)
• Photo Sharing (”photos”)
• Podcasting (”podcasting”)
• Presentation (”presentation”)
• RSS & Readers (”rss”)
• Screencasting (”screencasting”)
• Social Bookmarking(”bookmarking”)
• Social Networking(”socialnetworking”)
• Social Notetaking (”socialnotes”)
• Start Pages (”startpages”)
• Video Conferencing(”videoconferencing”)
• Video Sharing (”video”)
• Virtual Worlds (”virtualworlds”)
• Webmail (”webmail”)
• Wikis (”wikis”)

 

Joining is free! Visit: www.classroom20.com