- How to make your presentations look better and more effectively communicate your point
- How graphic design can help with your messaging
- How to add dynamic and engaging content into your presentations
- Where to find resources for class that other teachers have tried and recommend
- How Google Play for Education can augment your class
- How apps can help engage your students
So there are some free parts to this area (YAY!) and some affordable but not free parts (Yay if someone is paying for you). I'm all about free for education. I'm also all about paying someone for their hard work, but we're not in this for our fat paychecks, so I'm going to really focus on the free part here, and provide you some basics on the pay parts. Check it out if you're interested!
First up, Google Presentation which is the slide format app. Slide presentations are easy to slap together in a short amount of time, but if you have more time, you should use the formatting and insert options and really make it engaging. For example, in this provided sample from Google, compare slides 1 & 2. Slide 1 is a slap down of information you need to share. Slide 2 is what people want to see. It has visual appeal, but beyond that, plastering words into a slide is not teaching visually, it's being lazy. Adding images, and labels, and providing relevant text is teaching visually. Lecturing via presentation slides and handouts is not differentiated instruction. Providing intractable links and graphic organizers with instructional figures and links to the presentation that attendees can follow along with in their own devices is differentiated - and engaging!
Imagine your class is 1:1, all students have a Chromebook, or similar, with access to GAFE. You create a presentation with links to interactive lessons, create forms for mini-quizzes, provide the links with study questions on slides, separate the students into groups, and share both the presentation, and a class google doc for students to work in their groups, summarizing their results. Now take it one step further. The students create their own presentation on their group's lesson, and provide links to the shared Doc, and now the class is flowing from group to group, presentation to presentation, fully engaged, without a pile of photocopied handouts being recycled later. Sign me up!
The last part has to do with Google Play for Education store. There are a lot of apps targeted for education, without ads, for reasonable price ($3). These have reviews from teachers, for teachers. Not everything worth doing in class is free - that's why we have budgets. You may find an alternative to that paperback you were planning on buying 50 copies of. Or that $300 per copy Science text for 300 students, because the old copies have theories that need to be updated. Get digital copies, and use the savings to buy apps that let students Play with those theories! When you buy the app, you can choose the number of license you need for your students, and then send the link to download at the same time to their school email. Only downside is this is often a one-shot deal, so while you're only spending $3 for a student, you would do it every year (or semester). Text books can live much longer (or well past their usefulness). You will have to weigh the pros and cons for yourself, but in specific situations, you may land upon that engaging tool you've been missing to really make the connection to your students you have been trying to find.
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