Weeek 2 digital story telling

This week I wrote specifically about being creative, and then about how non-creative I am with my presentations. I create a presentation for each of my online classes once a week. That is roughly 80 presentation a semester. At this point my process has been to take last years power point look it over and add to it. Looking back this process has created some long boring and confusing presentations. I am very excited about taking a new and more creative approach to the process of creating my presentations. For one thing I have always felt compelled to include quite a bit of detail to my presentation as many of my students would be downloading the power point and using it a their main information source. This meant that I overloaded my in person presentation. Now I will create detailed handouts with references and links included for my students to access online. I will then attempt to create interesting interactive experiences for my synchrounous presentations. This will be better for my students and more fun for me as well. I can't wait to start doodling on those legal pads.

Week one of Digital storytelling

So I was busy telling stories last weekend using a power point put together by my school principal. The presentation itself turned out to be very effective, much hand shaking and thank you's afterward nice comments from colleague and calls to the office regarding the fine presentation. Only thing is the internet did not work at the presentation so I had to wing most of the presentation. After reading the articles and Presentation Zen this week I realized that the success of the presentation was due to the simplicity of the slide presentation. If it were full of details about what they were going to see when we all logged in to the website they would surely have met with great disappointment. Instead I related the story of how I teach my class and what role the student and parents have in the learning process. It was helpful to have them see some screen shots as well (I ran to Starbucks and quickly saved some screen shots to include in the power point) I was able to show them that the important information I was telling them could be found in four different areas and that there was plenty of support at the start an during the school year for their student and parent as well. I am going back tomorrow for a second round and hope to use some of what I have learned for the presentations tomorrow. I will let you know how it goes.