How to Present

If you have the time over the break, check out Scott Elias' slidecast below. This should be a prerequisite to every preservice teacher before they take their first job so they don't do as I did and repeat the presentation mistakes of the teachers I had.

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Technorati Tags: scottelias, presentation, design, education

The UStream Feed

Below is the presentation from NJECC "Web 2.0, Meet Sparta Township Public Schools," via UStream and the slides to match. For some reason I could not get CamTwist to show my desktop on UStream. Maybe I need another tutorial (thanks Robin).

In all, I thought it went well, but it always seems that I could talk forever about the pedagogical advantages of some of the tools available to us. However, I could tell by some of the expressions from the audience that 40 minutes was just enough. Let me know what you think.

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Kyle MacDonald and the Absence of Fear

One of our English teachers at the high school, Dee Peselli, invited a young man, author, traveler and opportunist Kyle MacDonald, to speak to her classes the other day in our auditorium. I have been so busy between the two buildings I work in that it was only by the stroke of good luck that I heard the Media Specialist talking about setting up the projector and the cameras for the speaker. When I asked her who was speaking, her response was "that paperclip guy."

Last year, on a flight to Florida, I read an article in Reader's Digest about a man who began a quest to trade a red paperclip in the hopes of getting something better. That man was MacDonald, and after a year of trading, he did indeed get something far better than a paperclip. He got a house, complete with deed and tax bill.

He also wrote a book about the experience, and part of what he does now is promote that book. The other part of what he does now is travel. Dee hooked up with him just because, as she put it, "His number was on the website, so I called." Kyle happened to be passing through to Atlanta on Wednesday and asked if he could stop by to speak with our students. For two hours he answered questions about the process of trading a red paperclip for other objects and services until making the final trade for a house.

Peppered throughout his presentation, aside from a raucous slideshow, were some sagacious moments where the students asked him basic questions, like "where did this idea come from?" or "why do this?" His answers, which I guess are at the heart of the book, really struck a chord with the students. His motivation truly stemmed from an absence of fear. His dad had asked him this question:

"What would you do if you weren't afraid?"

He wholeheartedly admits that the question is straight from Who Moved My Cheese, but still, it added such value to his idea, and it immediately dictated how he set out on this quest.

It reminds me of the posts that and the chatter that came out on the backchannels at NECC when Chris Lehmann began asking everyone "what is the worst possible consequence of your best idea?" The questions are similar in that both ask you to examine the sources of what is halting your progress, and then summarily dispose of that constraint.

How would we progress forward if we weren't sometimes our own biggest enemy? I am sitting here trying to put together this presentation on Teaching with Tablet PC's and introducing a group of 70+ teachers to the idea of creating and publishing content that is accessible to an audience wider than 150 students, yet I find myself holding a lot back due to the tendency for this to overwhelm people. Should that fear suspend what I think should be said and shown?

The Flattest I Have Ever Been

How many posts have you seen lately that start like this:

"Last night, there I was sitting in my living room hanging out with my network, when all of a sudden I am in a conference halfway around the world with all of these really smart people..."

Well, here is mine.

We had a lot of laundry to do last night in my house, so we didn't really get finished with that and cleaning up from dinner until around 10pm EST. At that point, I figured I would just start setting myself up for the following day by answering some emails and making some quick tutorials. I made the fortuitous decision to check up on Twitter and engage a little bit. Within a few minutes of being there, Kim Cofino sends out a call for participants in a Web 2.0 presentation she is doing for the parents of her school using Google Presenter. I click the link and am transported to her presentation in Thailand along with 17-20 others.

Then I start checking out who is there. For a second I really thought my Google Reader account spilled over into the Presentation: David Jakes, Carolyn Foote, Chris Lehmann, Jo McLeay, Lucy Gray, and so many more that I kicked myself in the shins this morning that I didn't write it down. Even better than the guest list was the element that was added to the presentation for Kim. She was talking about global collaboration and was able to demonstrate it without much effort because we were all so jazzed to be there.

A few things that immediately strike me about this format:

• The nature of the presentation has changed. Presentation is quickly becoming synonymous with facilitation, as you could spend much of your time courting ideas from the visitors of the presentation and managing dialogue between both parties as you would normally spend speaking or demonstrating.
• Does this really work for everyone? Were the parents too blown away to follow the dialogue? I don't know how I would react if I were in the audience sans laptop; it may have been too much to follow.
• Conferences are going to be flat out fun.

The format was so open and engaging, it was hard to pull off and actually get some sleep. However, to my surprise, when I came to work this morning, there was Kristin Hokanson doing something similar on social bookmarking. I couldn't resist.

Administrator 2.0

It was a rush, to put it lightly.

Wednesday, I had the opportunity to present some ideas on school change, leadership, social networking, and ongoing district projects to our whole team of administrators from the K-12 buildings. I had been waiting for this.

The wiki (private for now) I created for it doesn't really do it justice because of the discussion that took place in the breaks, or the people who stopped me afterward and pushed the topics further, or asked for more time on these the projects we saw. I didn't hit the nail squarely, as I explained to my wife, as I feel that I didn't really address the need for them to be reading administrator blogs or teacher blogs, nor did I show them how their teachers can fully utilize some of the new tools we have added to district machines, but, hey, I only had 2.5 hours.

Here was the agenda:

1. Overview and Purpose
2. What skills are our students going to need to compete in a changing workplace environment?
3. Does our pedagogy prepare them for that workplace?
4. When you meet with teachers, what can you offer by means of improvement of instruction or preparation through technology?
5. What meaningful experiences are teachers in your building, your district and beyond engaged in with their students?
6. What are some tools I can use to become more productive and save time while performing tasks that are essential to my job?

I really adhered to Scott's post from while ago and tried to focus on issues that they currently deal with, and how to make them more productive. One of the issue that stood out from my contact with teachers over the past year was lack of specific direction coming from post-observation meetings. When told to incorporate technology, what did that mean? When told to differentiate instruction, how did they do that? During my presentation, I tried to give examples of specific methods they could incorporate into their written evaluations.

There has been a recent spate of posts about meetings like this (see Bach, Chris, and Barbara), where the presenters were asked to accomplish a lot in a small amount of time. Reflecting on it, I truly love the moment where you know you've prepared, and you are so ready that you are inviting dissension that leads to discussion.

Anyone else out there doing anything similar?

Presentation at NJECC

Today two teachers that I worked with on a recent wiki project are presenting at NJECC, and I just threw together a quick presentation using spresent. Also, below is a podcast of the interview their students did with author Edward Bloor.







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