Effective Presentations

     In the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ben Stein plays Bueller's boring Economics teacher. He presents a lesson to a very uninterested class (link). 21 years later and many teachers have only improved on this by adding a presentation with equally boring slides.
     There are numerous ways to get presentations wrong. Far too often presenters give you too much or too little information on a slide, or they are simply using the slides as a teleprompter. Many people need to view this presentation found on SlideShare.
     Good presentations should have the factors "stickiness" and storytelling (Hicks, 2013). You must be able to convey in your presentation that the message relates to the audience, and you want them to remember that message when you are done. Not everyone is able to relay that effectively. I think Bandler and Kiley (2017) said it best:

Typical presentations feature slides or posters crammed with text that is hard to read and digest, small images, dense tables, lengthy equations, and detailed flow diagrams. The speaker's visual material is often inadequately acknowledged, and his or her oral delivery rushed in an inaudible monotone. Speakers regularly run out of whatever time they are allotted, whether three minutes, 20 minutes, or 50 minutes.

     How often have we sat in a boring professional development, faculty meeting, or program training only to tune the speaker out for minutes at a time? We often loose interest quickly and start playing with our phone. Sometimes this can be blamed on the presenter.

     Eminem's lyrics may describe the perfect storm of a bad presentation, but I am sure that we have all sat in on those train wrecks. We have all had to deal with presenters that made you question their credentials or career choices. I know I have secretly wanted to pull the presenter aside, or email them a link to a training like this one from Jeanne Trojan:

Seven ways to kill your presentation from Jeanne Trojan

     So what can be done about it? How can we as educators ensure that we can effectively kill bad presentations? We need to start by creating effective presentations for our classroom and requiring students to prepare effective presentations. Hicks (2013) stated that "although the tendency of any digital writer creating any digital text is to begin by opening a new file in whatever program he or she intends to use, the best place to start is with pencil and paper." I know I have never thought that way. If I want to make a Powerpoint or presentation I immediately open Office or Google Slides. At this very moment I am creating this blog directly on Blogger with no plan as to what comes next.
     Our text Crafting Digital Writing has numerous quotes and tips for how to map out effective presentations. It gives examples and guidelines that should be followed in education and the corporate world. I created the following trying to follow those guidelines and use information from the wealth of sites available for people to break out of the boring presenter rut.

     Using all of the information available in our classroom we can have our students composing extraordinary presentations and guarantee that we have excitement in our classrooms and professional learning.







Bandler, J. W., & Kiley, E. M. (2017). In the First Few Blinks of an Eye: The Basics of Engaging Presentation. IEEE Microwave Magazine, 18(2), 112-120. doi: 10.1109/MMM.2016.2636681

Desjardins, J. (2010). You Suck At PowerPoint! by @jessedee[PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/jessedee/you-suck-at-powerpoint

Hicks, T. (2013). Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres.  T. Antao (Ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

pmw8000 (2011, December 12)."Anyone, anyone" teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA.

Sparsh Gupta (2012, January 31). eminem lose yourself lyrics [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Un9HLDCTCs

Trojan, J. (2010). Seven ways to kill your presentation[PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/jmtcz/seven-ways-to-kill-your-presentation

Finding, Choosing, and Creating Web Texts

We, as educators in a digital world, have a profound responsibility to find, use and create appropriate web texts.  As written by Maloy (2016) “teachers must teach and students must learn the skills and dispositions of critical web users and online researchers” (Digital Literacy in an Information Age section, para. 1). This can be a daunting task. Today’s world gives people the ability to post web-text with amazing ease. They have the choice to use social media, forums, chat-rooms, websites, blogs, and even comment section of other web texts. Technology today also gives us an amazing ability to find that material. With just a quick search of the term web-text, Google returns 148 million results in less than one second. Hicks (2013) stated that we need to “pay attention to how we pay attention,” (p. 33).

To make this even more complicated we have been bombarded with “fake” news. Free web-sites are available to anyone with a device and an internet connection. For every legitimate site on the web, there are 20 more with false, misleading, or incomplete information. Some are done intentionally to get page views and some are done for political and/or personal reasons. This is a problem in education because as Maloy (2016) said "for many online searchers, research means using Google, consulting Wikipedia, or viewing YouTube and then reporting what they find as factual information," (Digital Literacy in an Information Age section, para. 2).

Video

How does a teacher reliably sort through all of this material to determine what would make a reliable online text? Having a formal professional looking page like the source page for the video above does not prove anything. It can lead to a complex and almost impossible scenario. Even “scholarly” journals are not immune. According to an article in the Washington Post “A “peer review and citation ring” was apparently rigging the review process to get articles published,” (Barbash 2014). Teachers should encourage their students to check other sources and to research sources and citations before choosing web-texts as facts.

Hicks (2013) stated in that “we need to invite them to think clearly about both content and form,” (p. 33). Appropriate web text should be more than a Word document with a URL, but less than a glitzed up fan page with hundreds of links, pictures and videos. Hicks (2013) described these as “digitally convenient or digitally enhanced,” (p. 34).

Finding appropriate web based text is only part of the battle; we must also model and teach how to create a good web text. There are numerous sites and videos out there ready to help you create a dazzling site that pops and stands out from the crowd.

We must remember that we do not want our web text to put the reader to sleep or to give them a seizure. Just because we have five hundred links and thousands of photos and gifs on our topic of choice, we do not have to put them all on our site. We must model and instruct the best practices and not rely strictly on a keyword search on our favorite search engine.

Barbash, F. (2014, July 10). Scholarly journal retracts 60 articles, smashes ‘peer review ring’. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/10/scholarly-journal-retracts-60-articles-smashes-peer-review-ring/?utm_term=.b2c7342e17f1

Hicks, T., (2013). Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres.  T. Antao (Ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Maloy, R. (2016). Commentary: Building web research strategies for teachers and students. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 16 (2). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/volume-16/issue-2-16/social-studies/commentary-building-web-research-strategies-for-teachers-and-students

NewMediaRanch (2015, January 10). How to Write Good Copy For The Web [Video file]. Retreived from https://youtu.be/X83Co6GidBY.

Video courtesy of www.theonion.com. Retrieved from http://www.theonion.com/video/how-us-schools-can-improve-math-education-54594