Powerpoints, everybody sing-a-long!

At the beginning of the school year, I had the enjoyment of meeting and watching Will Richardson present to the supervisory union faculty inservice at Killington. He was awesome. Animated, great support in his powerpoint, links. Made me want to get back out there and 2.0 the students with everything I had in me. Thank goodness Will spoke in the morning and had a plane to catch out of there, so he didn't have to sit around for the lackluster presentations later.
Did you ever have to watch a powerpoint presentation where it felt like, "follow the bouncing ball! everybody sing!" One of the teams of presenters which came after Will, literally read word for word the information on the screen. Where Will's presentation was colorful, with varied text, had links with audio, paused for audience interaction, etc., these presenters had overcrowded slides, colors that were not bright or varied, and absolutely said the same thing that was on the screen behind them. No variation from the script. To present, you have to have a little bit of actor in you, I understand. But anyone who's been up in front of a classroom of rowdy kids should have a pretty good grasp on getting and keeping the attention of their audience. I actually started to feel bad for the students these people were teaching. How could they be effective educators when they were putting the whole room to sleep? Maybe I'm being too harsh, I wasn't the one in front of a hundred people. However, as educators, we need to be able to ad-lib a little. I can definitely see where just giving the bare minimum on the powerpoint slides and filling in the gaps with an interactive lecture style would be a far more effective presentation. Making text of varied size and changing background colors to emphasize the transitions in the presentation, can all add to audience appeal and make you a more effective presenter. I can see I'm setting myself up to really have to do a great job on this forthcoming project. Will Richardson's book, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms"; anybody looked through it? A bit overwhelming, but a powerful teaching aid. Educating our students to be information literate is really becoming every teacher's job.
Melissa 11/5/09