What Makes a Good Presentation?

What Do We See in a Good Presentation? (in no particular order)

1. Multimedia – don’t just project text on a screen – try to show what you mean with careful selections of music, video, photos or graphics – try to avoid simply choosing some clip art that does the job – be thoughtful and use your multimedia elements intelligently and for maximum effect

2. Organization – break your presentation into sections that work together and make sense – shorter, more concise groupings of ideas help your audience – make sure your group members have equal tasks, ensure all your equipment and material is ready to be used, and so on

3. Engagement – use your voice, body language and the content of your project with an awareness of your audience, realizing that you need to attract their interest and attention

4. Knowledge – you have to truly know your subject matter – that way you won’t simply read your notes, you will be able to deal with questions, and you will have much more authority and confidence

5. Preparation – research your subject and prepare a useful breakdown of the different parts of your presentation, either by topic within that subject, or as simply as planning your Opening, Main Points, Summary, Questions and Closing and setting up your notes with key words that keep you on track

Awesome Assignment Idea

Teaching the patterns of the Joseph Campbell monomyth/quest wheel, archetypes, literary devices, symbolism, etc as a series of patterns which can then be applied to a series of blog-based assignments geared to any book that a student chooses to read.

So, get those open-choice novel projects brewing, especially considering the challenges with buying class sets of novels.

Potentially Interesting C-level Assignment Idea

Have students respond to what they've read in their class reading time by "translating" one or two selections of what they've read into into some other form.

Example: a student who reads To Kill A Mockingbird may choose to turn the book into a board game that puts into effect the situations of the plot as experienced by Jem and Scout.

A Shortcut To Know About Differentiated Instruction

ETFO bookclub talked about this book on DI that you may want to scan by reading this PDF.

What Should Students Read?

This PDF is something that we may wish to check out.

It is about the books that we choose for our students to read, why we should think about these choices, and so on.

And this next one is an article with some more specific book recommendations (US-based, I'm afraid).

Discourse Communities

Something that came up as a board interest at a meeting on May 27, 2010 was this term "discourse community."

You might want to check into this, perhaps starting at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_community