How to avoid "Death by Power Point"

One of the topics we dealt with in one of our ECO lessons is Power Point presentations.
The teacher showed us a video (click here if you would like to see it ) about power point presentations. The presenter spoke about why presentations turn out to be very boring and how we can prevent it. It was very interesting and very funny. The most interesting thing about the video was that we all connected some points mentioned in the video by McMillan with power presentations we had to give or were given by other students or teachers. 

The thing is that I was surfing the net yesterday when I read this tweet:

["Death by powerpoint" is a term relating to the intense boredom/hatred of useless powerpoint presentations.]

At first, I thought it was a joke... or fake. So, I googled "Death by power point" thinking that nothing would come up. But to my surprise, it did! There's information about it on Wikipedia and many other sites:

“Death by PowerPoint” is a criticism of slide-based presentations referring to a state of boredom and fatigue induced by information overload during presentations such as those created by the Microsoft application PowerPoint"

So, I decided to make an entry on my blog about death by powerpoint and how we can "prevent it". I think it is very important to know how to avoid "dying by power point", because not knowing how to design a presentation appropriately can cause our presentations to pass by unnoticed and bore our audience.
I read many things (most of them very funny), so I decided to choose some of them to point out:
The thing that I would like to point out, is that people think that some of the factors contributing to this "phenomenon" are the lacks of:

1. Significance: why do we present? does the information have a clear meaning? 
2. Structure: are we presenting the information with good interesting arguments to support it and in a clear way? 
3. Simplicity: "Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler". This means we should not turn our power points into Word documents by putting a lot of text in one slide, for example. 
4. Rehearsal: If you think you don't need to rehearse a presentation, you are wrong. Many things that are part of our presentations have to be rehearsed, it will not work out completely the first time. 

I think that these factors are realistic and should be taken into account when we design a powerpoint or any other presentation (for example, a Prezi presentation). I haven't done so when I designed my presentations because I didn't know the things that I thought were good to include in a power point (the use of lot of texts, many bullet points, no pictures, etc.) were actually boring my audience. But now that I know how I can improve my designing of the presentations, I will start doing it. Since I am going to be a teacher, it is very important to know how to design effective and eye-catching powerpoint presentations, not only for my benefit (students will pay attention),but for their benefit too.

I also found an article from the North Carolina State University which is very interesting because it has some do's and dont's of powerpoint presentations designing. Click here if you would like to read it.
If you would like to read information of the factors contributing to death by power point you can click here.

See you next time!

Evaluating Websites

For our 1st practical work, we were asked to to choose a set of criteria and apply these criteria to evaluate two websites per group: one that can be used as a resource for the teacher as a materials designer and another one that presents digital resources that can be directly used in the classroom. I would like to give you some information about this topic.
I remember that when I was at secondary school we had to search information about certain topics and the first thing we did was to type the words in Google. The first result that came up was the one we chose. Sometimes, the site you choose is not the best or has incorrect information. It even happened to one of my friends once, that she included information in a practical work that was not true. Of course, she didn't know the information was fake. She didn't pass the practical work because of that.

Here are some useful criteria proposed by The University of Lesley on Evaluating Websites. Each of these criteria provides you with questions you can use to evaluate websites. 

• Purpose
• Authority
• Objectivity
• Appropriateness
• Currency
• Responsibility
• Clarity
• Accessibility

I think it is very important for us teachers to make students aware of the fact that some information posted on the internet is not reliable and that there are some sources more reliable than others. The most important thing we have to do is to check if the information we are giving to our students is true or not.  

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.

Welcome again! This post is about Digital Natives (DN) and Digital Immigrants (DI). If you don't know what these are, don't worry. You'll find out now.
We talked about DN and DI in one of our lessons after reading an article written by Marc Prensky. Digital natives are “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, videogames and the Internet. Those who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in their lives, become fascinated (or not) by and adopted (or tried to adopt) many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

                                                                                             DN - Active Learners.

                                           

The two world-views that Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants represent are different. 
Here's a picture that can give you a better idea of what I'm talking about:

My brothers, sister and me are digital natives because since we were children, we grew up using computers, playing video games and then started to use cell phones or smartphones.This is not new to us and we know how to use them without needing any kind of explanation. My parents are digital immigrants. When they grew up, there were no cellphones, computers or internet. It was very difficult for them to learn to use cellphones and the computer, and they even refused to do so. Nevertheless, they learnt and adapted to this new aspects of technology, but they still are Immigrants. 

I realised that many of the aspects of my personal way of learning are mentioned in the video. My phone is with me all the time, also my laptop. I'm constantly logged on social networks, I get text messages constantly, even my e-mails on my phone. Now, we have apps to be in touch with our teachers! Isn't it great? 
I believe that it is important not to look at the fact that people use a lot the internet with suspicious eyes. Changes are healthy, most of the times. The fact that we are able to learn hundreds of kilometres away from each other is awesome. 
We don't have to keep on cutting off trees to make books if we use e-readers or PDFs. I could name many more of these advantages of using technology to learn. 

I hope people will start adapting to digital natives. These are our students now. We have many tools at hand to make the process of learning a lot more enjoyable. Let's use them.

If you are not acquainted with Marc Prensky's article on Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, you can find it on PDF here.

Click to enlarge.

Thank you for reading! :)

Welcome!

Hi there! This is the first time I post on my blog, so... Welcome! I've never had a blog, so this is a new experience for me. I hope I can really get the best out of this. Here I will share interesting quotes, videos, documents that I find on the net + other things related to the subject ECO II. 
This picture will be the very first post on this blog because it represents pretty much what I've come to believe as regards teaching and learning. I have this clearer now that I am (hopefully) on my last year of the Teacher Training Course, but it is something I have learnt throughout my years studying at Brown . For me, it is very important to bare in mind that not all of us learn in the same way or at the same pace, patience is very important when you are a teacher. 
So, welcome!