12 Brain Rules & Making Presentations

This post from Presentation Zen brings together several personal interests of mine: psychology and the brain, teaching, learning, and presenting. First, it brings in information from brain rules by John Medina. This book explores the idea of what would happen if you take brain science and redesign the classroom. Part of the redesign is about how we communicate information to our students. Of course, we lecture to students and we use powerpoint presentations but how effective are our presentations? Medina incudes a nice slide show that emphasizes one of his brain rules regarding the impact of visuals over text. The video at the end of this post addresses the myth of multitasking. Sometimes, we give in to the notion that multitasking is a productive skill and that multitasking is something that younger students can do and older adults cannot. I teach my students every year about selective attention and it's relationship to sensory processing and memory so I understand the myth of multitasking. I understand personally when I see my production decline because of all the distractions of the internet and I see it in my students when they are distracted in the classroom. So, follow some brain rules, throw away your old powerpoint presentations and get the full, undivided attention of your students. And while you are it, turn off your computer and really focus on the task in front of you. After you read and comment on my blog, of course!

VoiceThread & PowerPoint

I took a powerpoint and saved all my slides as jpeg files. I uploaded the jpegs to VoiceThread, added some commentary and came up with this (keep the comments about Powerpoint Hell to a minimum, I'm experimenting!):

VoiceThread

I believe VoiceThread has some interesting classroom possibilities. Students can record voice or text responses to the same picture or groups of pictures. Teachers can record quick explanations to diagrams, formulas, etc. Slideshows can easily be narrated (you could even save PP slides as jpegs then upload them to voicethread to have collaboration take place with your entire class (or subset of students could respond to each pic). If you have ideas...post them here! Better yet, if you create a VoiceThread...post a link and share.

PowerPoint-With Notes & Online

I came across this Powerpoint when exploring the Edutopia website that I talked about in the previous post. This struck me for 2 reasons. One, is that it is so simple to publish a powerpoint to the web that we often miss opportunities to do this for our students. We can simply post the PP file but as you can see here, the design of the online slide show is somewhat different. What I like about this version is the notes section. It made me think of the how I might change a PP assignment. I like the organizational requirement of having a slide that has minimal information and a notes section that reflects what one might add during a narration or speech. The outline on the left can be a formative step (and assessment) as they prepare the presentation. Now, the big question...do you know how to show students to use the notes and outline features and could you publish it on the web as shown here?

Powerpoint Hell...revisited.

Maybe I got through to one group in my class about avoiding Powerpoint Hell. Check out this short PP that briefly covers the Dance Craze of the late 1950's and early 1960's. There is stuff in this powerpoint that I don't even know how to do. You won't hear some of the audio but you will see some cool effects.

Powerpoint Hell

If students are doing powerpoint presentations in your class and you want to try to avoid powerpoint hell, then this brief pp presentation might be useful. Although it is 55 slides, you will see very quickly how much information is communicated on one slide and how quickly you can go through 55 slides and communicate important ideas.