Friday, September 24, 2010
Forget PowerPoint! Use These!
Here's a great overview of some tools that you can use to present content that doesn't involve bullet points on a slide. It's called "A New Way To Lecture" and it was put together by Michael Zimmer. Thanks to Kathy Schrock's weekly "Help for Busy School Teachers" for bringing it to my attention. I shall definitely use this both with my own faculty and with the Independent School's Beginning Teacher Institute technology lessons I will offer beginning soon.
4 comments:
September 29, 2010
This is great Alecia - a one-stop shop for learning a little bit about many of the most popular tools right now. There are several that I will investigate. This year, I had a heck of time embedding a video into my PowerPoint presentation at Back to School Night. Sounds like there is a better mousetrap out there!
Thanks for sharing my "New Way to Lecture" document. I hope your readers find it useful!
What a great resource. Thanks ABD.
Thank you for this presentation! The video about PowerPoint was hilarious (and too true)! I am currently in the final couple of months of a graduate program for teaching certification, and the strong emphasis on classroom technology integration in my program is a reflection of how important this has become. Just five years ago I taught French in a private school that had two projectors for the entire school to share. In the school where I am student teaching now, there are projectors in every classroom that are operated by a Smart Cart, which also contains a computer, a document camera, and a DVD/VCR (yes, VCR... I guess there are still some VHS tapes floating around out there). The Smart Cart is only a drop in the bucket compared to what some schools have (a few of my classmates are placed in schools with 1-1 laptop programs), but it is a big step up from what was typically found in classrooms not so long ago.
Professors and colleagues have introduced me to a large number of Web 2.0 applications in the last year, and several of them could certainly take the place of a traditional PowerPoint. These options are not only more interesting to the audience, but they are, for the most part, free of charge. This is very appealing to school districts that are facing budget cuts on one hand and pressure to prepare students for an increasingly tech-savvy world on the other. Why would districts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Microsoft software when there are better, less expensive alternatives available? Thank you for shedding light on these wonderful applications. I look forward to trying several of them myself!
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