Tag Archives: presentation

Voice and choice

This was my Facebook memory from 3 years ago:

Spent well over 15hrs at work today and came home totally pumped! Students rocked their presentations at our open house tonight.

The whole event exceeded my expectations, starting with about 240 people coming (more than I had reservations or seats for), and ending with students interviewing each other with questions from the audience.

It is simply amazing what student’s can do when they are given voice & choice, and they are provided with time to explore their passions and publicly share them.

Congratulations to our Inquiry Hub students, you were amazing school ambassadors today!

I’ve been thinking and writing about giving students choice, voice, and an authentic audience for over a decade now. And, I’ll always remember this night as the night I really saw it fully come to life.

Everything about this open house went amazing. The only challenges where parking, and adding more seats to the gym. The students did 90% of the planning and executed a seamless event with perfect sound and incredible presentations that opened people’s eyes to what’s possible when students feel empowered in a school.

The best part of the night was watching students interviewing students about their inquiry projects. Our students got to share what kinds of projects they do, designed by them, to follow their passions and interests as part of their school day. This is the real strength of what we do at Inquiry Hub.

There are students just like ours in every school. The difference is, in many other schools, students spend their days following a pattern of going class to class and doing what the teacher tells them to do. Yes, some of those things teachers ask them to do are amazing. But students seldom get a part of their day to choose what they want to work on. Students seldom get to design their own learning on a topic of their choice.

What we’ve learned as educators at Inquiry Hub is that to do this, students need scaffolding and support, working on progressively bigger projects. Students need assistance with time management and being self directed. And students need to try, fail, learn, and grow.

Whenever I hear a senior student at Inquiry Hub talk about their projects, they talk about being fearless learners who aren’t afraid to fail along the way. They will often do this while telling a story about something others would consider a huge success, but to them there was still more to do, or aspects of the project not yet achieved. This resilience only comes when students feel they have voice and choice in their learning, and this open house three years ago told me that we were finally achieving the kind of student empowerment we were hoping to achieve when we started the school.

Slides are free

I think it was Rodd Lucier that told me ‘Slides are free’ after I did a presentation at a conference at Niagara Falls 6 years ago. I came off stage and asked for feedback and that’s what he said.

To give it some context, I had shared a slide with more than one idea on it, like this:

And then I quickly discussed each idea. It’s ok to share a slide like this for context, but then instead of talking about all 3 quickly on the same slide, I could have had three more slides, one for each idea. Here is the first example:

It costs nothing to add that slide, and 2 more like it, to my presentation deck. It’s a way to declutter what the audience is looking at, and let’s them focus on what exactly I’m talking about.

With tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls there is a loss of screen size for the presentation being shown, due to the webinar frame around the screen-share window. Words that are too small, or images of items that take up less than a third of the page become unreadable and decorative rather than functional. Too many words? Increase the font size and put the information on 2 or 3 slides. Breaking down a concept? Sure you can share a slide with the 3-4 ideas or images on it, but then add 3-4 more slides with each idea shared individually.

The extra slides are free, and the separated and uncluttered ideas on the slides are freeing for the presenter, and the audience.

Anatomy of a Tweet

Harnessing the Power and Potential of Social Media to Build Learning Communities #CDNedtech19

I’ve been invited to host a Round Table Breakout Session at the 10th Canadian EdTech Leadership Summit today, titled; “Harnessing the Power and Potential of Social Media to Build Learning Communities.” The invitation was born out of a Podcast I did with conference organizer Robert Martellacci @MindShareLearn, where we discussed my free ebook, Twitter EDU.


You can get the book here:

FREE on Apple, the iTunes version is available here.

FREE on Barnes & Noble, the NOOK version is available here.

Download the FREE ePub version now from Smashwords: (You might need to open this in your web browser, if you came here via mobile Twitter: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/776978 )

What I’ll share below are resources to support the conversation, and hopefully this can also be a resource to come back to later, after the discussion.

For those interested in tweeting during the discussion, please use both of these hashtags: #CDNedtech19 and #TwitterEDU

Advice from Dave Sands @dhsands: (If you are playing along, follow the people I share tweets from!)

DHSands Twitter Advice

My True Story Of Connectedness about my network being better than Google:

Here is a short link to the video: 2di.me/connectedstory.

Here is a Twitter Moment I shared where I asked, “What’s the best advice that you have to share with someone that’s new to Twitter?”

Best Twitter Advice for Twitter Newbies

Short link: 2di.me/advice

Discussion Points/Questions

Hardest part of Twitter

“The hardest part of Twitter is that it does not have a friendly entry point.”

What are the challenges of engaging on social media?

—–

Bill Ferriter @plugusin “My goal in social media spaces isn’t to “have a bigger audience.” My goal is to find people who challenge my practice.” (Link to tweet)

What are you looking for from your social media network? 

“Geography used to confine and limit our networks, and now we can connect to people from around the world.”

What excites you about the possibilities of being a networked/connected learner? 

Twitter is a river

“Think of Twitter as a river of information that streams by, not a pool of information that you collect.”

How do you manage the stream of information ‘coming at you’ in today’s digitally connected world? 

See ‘Drinking from the fire hose‘.

drinking from a fire hose

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Additional Twitter Advice

Cross-Posted on my Pair-a-Dimes Blog.

Student Presentations

Today I got to watch 3 teams from the YELL class, Coquitlam Open Learning‘s Entrepreneurship 12 Course, practice their presentations for the YELL finals happening this Saturday.

Students from Coquitlam, Richmond and West Vancouver will compete again this year, at YELL Canada’s 3rd Annual Venture Challenge – “A Dialogue in Youth Entrepreneurship”.

Emily Naing, one of last year’s students from the Coquitlam team, that went to the finals (and came a close second to the overall winner), started us off with a little motivation and she answered questions about her experience last year. Emily is continuing the development of the pitch her team gave… with the help of a $300,000 grant that her team got after the finals. She spoke about how 2nd place actually pushed her team to prove themselves even more than if they got the 1st place spot. I still remember the email her team sent the night of the finals:

Hi,

This is SWAVE from the venture challenge. We were so impacted by the connections made today that we are determined to keep moving forward with our idea. We hope to enter more business competitions and ventures and hope to actually develop a prototype with adequate research. If there are any connections you can refer us to, or if you (the founders) would like to support us in our journey with this product, please reply to our email.

Thank you so much,

Founders of Swave

Daily-Ink-Emily-YELL

Watching the presentations, I realize how important it is for us to give students authentic opportunities to first develop, then present their ideas. Although all the groups had things to work on, there was obvious passion and interest in doing a great presentation.

I think the competition is healthy. I also think the idea of presenting to real investors and/or business school profs, increases the stakes. And I think that we need to proved authentic avenues for students to present beyond the walls of our schools.

Good luck to all the teams on Saturday!

Please help me with my “Parenting in the digital age” presentation!

This is a humble request for help!

In early June of last year I created this presentation and wiki (details below). The sessions went well and now I’ve been asked to present again. This time the audience is Chinese parents and I have a translator. My slide show is heavily text based because I tried to make it work as a ‘stand-alone’ presentation to support the wiki without me presenting,
(I even added presentation notes to the slideshare if you view it on their site).

…As a result, I am feeling like I almost have to start over before getting this translated.
…Furthermore, I feel like there are definite Western biases to the things I say.
…And finally, there are things that I wanted to add to improve this anyway such as:
• More multi-cultural examples
• Links to creative work done by students (outside of school)
• Include a video of a kid while he is in the role of a World of Warcraft guild master
• More advice and strategies for dealing with kids that are addicted to (or at least highly consumed by) video games – (What strategies work to deal with this?)
Any suggestions or examples would be greatly appreciated!

Be honest, be critical, be brutal if you need to be… just please offer suggestions to help me strip this down to the essentials before I get it translated.
(I’m presenting next week Tuesday:-)
– – – – – – – – – –

 

For this presentation I created a wiki: http://raisingdigitalkids.wikispaces.com/

These were the learning intentions:
  • Examine children’s use of technology
  • Increase awareness of the potential challenges around technology use
  • Learn practical, proactive parenting strategies to maintain connections with children using the media they are using.
  • Learn how to guide children in appropriate and safe interactions on the Internet.
  • Find support and resources to better understand these issues

A key part of the presentation is the handout called ‘Engaging with kids‘.  It is made up of a series of questions based on the presentation, but not necessarily in the presentation. The point is asking questions and finding the right balance or ‘fit’ for each family rather than offering any kind of prescribed answers.

via pairadimes.davidtruss.com

Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!