Power to the Powerpoint

Every year I go to a conference for freshwater ecologists. When I first started going over 10 years ago, presentations were on overhead transparency's, and a few years later they let us use power-point. Then came the flashy transitions which would always freeze. In the last few years most people just give a straightforward text and image presentation. First year Phd students love imbedding flash images and still use transitions which are used to make the audience laugh.

The reality is my colleagues and I may not be  harnessing the true the power of power-point and for this weeks refection on ITC's  I am going to experiment with power point and some other cool presentation tools to see just how these can come into the classroom. A review of these and some examples are posted on my webpage.

The following is my initial analysis of how powerpoint and related software could be used under the SAMR model.

I have had a crack at improving my skills in powerpoint and then extended to Prezi and Glogster.

In powerpoint I used in presentation  hyper-linking options and applied this to a short presentation on symbiosis as part of a biology class. Which I then uploaded using authorstream. This doesn't completely work with the links I put in, but I can see that with some practice both powerpoint and sharing tools will be useful for teaching.

What has much more potential, but will take me much more time to master is Prezi. This looks like lots of fun, and I think that this non-linear way of presenting information is going to be of more relevance to tech savvy students.

Finally, I had a play with some of the basic features of glogster which I think will be my new favorite tool for putting together handouts and posters. The link above takes you to a poster I put together for a biology assignment.

Symbiosis

More PowerPoint presentations from Claire Sellens

This morning I found this awsome TED talk about parasites: I would consider using this as a hook for bringing students in to the whole concept of symbiosis..