Week 6 in Review

During the past couple of weeks, we focused on Presentations, Screencasts and VoiceThreads. I learned some key ideas on how to make presentations more effective. Some useful hints include:
Keep it simple!
Use graphics to replace text.
Have an outline near the beginning of the talk that is repeated or re-emphasized later.
Reference the screen briefly to illustrate your point.
Say things like, “What I hope you can see here is…”
Some of the main problems that are regularly found in presentations include having too much text, misspelled words, excessive bullets, bad color schemes, too long, too much data, and too many animations.
After creating my own PowerPoint Presentation following these guidelines, I uploaded it onto www.slideshare.net and then embedded it onto my blog page. Next, I created a ScreenCast of my presentation. A ScreenCast is an online tool that allows you to create a video of what is happening on your computer’s desktop. Making a ScreenCast was fairly simple, yet to get good at it I had to practice capturing the correct portion of my screen and it also helped to have all of my dialogue written down before I started. The most useful tool I learned about this week was VoiceThread. This program allows you to upload your slideshow (as images) onto which you can add audio comments, or written notes. For example, I placed key questions next to each slide that my students should focus on. VoiceThread also allows different people to comment on each slide of the presentation. I will definitely be able to use this in my science classroom. All three examples are listed below in this blog.