a picture is worth a thousand words

When presenting information to students, it's important to pay attention to the students' experience. If you have traditionally lectured from slides with lots of words, I encourage you to reconsider. Please take a few minutes to read "NONLINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION: A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS" from TCEA's TechNotes in June.  Read more.

Matos’s Favorite Finds from TCEA

Here are my favorite finds from the TCEA (Texas Computer Educators Association) Convention…

Brain break/calming sites

• Weave Silk (you can drag a color circle onto another and they blend, the faster your mouse moves the more it shows the 2nd color)

• Color Mandala – very good for my symmetrical, organized brain!

Radial Timers

• Much less stressful than the traditional bomb countdown!

• 2-minutes, 5-minutes, 10-minutes

Amazon’s Leadership Principles

• Along the lines of what our students need to be Future Ready… These are the principles that Amazon leaders focus on every time they meet and in every decision they make. A trainer from Amazon shared these and stressed how they guide everything they do. 

• https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles 

Canva Presentations

• Magic Shortcuts - So fun! Create a quick Canva presentation then when in presentation mode, play with these:

• Present and Record - You can record yourself giving the presentation!

• If you don’t have a FREE educational Canva account, click here.

• Canva for Education also includes a Classroom so you can manage your students and see their work! Adding students also gives them access to all of the additional FREE Educational resources.

Yellkey.com 

• Creates a shortened URL for a short period of time. Great for sharing a URL with students when it’s just needed for that time during class. 

Crowd Buzzer

• Turns devices (phones, chromebooks) into a buzzer. Great for class review games!

• Teacher: https://ccg.buzz/host/ 

• Students: https://ccg.buzz/ 

Gimkit update 

• KitCollab - students can create content; you can pull from it to use

• Now the free account allows as many people as you want & includes basic game types

Wakelet

• Wakelet is like Pinterest for education. 

• When creating a new board, select from several layout options.

• Many types of items can be added to a Wakelet board. 

• Boards can be used as a template for students to add their own resources to 

• Boards can be collaborative for group work. 

• Ideas of use:

1. Backchannel during class

2. Keeping track of resources/research

3. Newsletters

4. Calming Rooms (examples: MS, HS)

5. Station work

6. Sub plans (example; great for subs who can’t log into Canvas)

• Examples: Representation of Disability Through The Media and Fairytales, The 3 Branches of Government, Art in the Time of COVID-19, Digital Citizenship

Building Culture in your School/Classroom

• Culture is built 30 seconds at a time.

• Stand in halls during passing periods and talk with kids!

• Congratulate students on accomplishments

• Idea to build relationships: 

1. Pull out your phone, open photos. 

2. Find one to share and tell the story. 

3. 1 minute per person in pairs.

• 3 key findings that work with EdTech

1. Interactive learning

2. Use of tech to explore and create rather than to drill and kill

3. The right blend of teachers and tech

Slido- Polls for Google Slides

https://youtu.be/j86dZLa4YJE

Slido is a new service that makes it easy to insert interactive quiz and poll questions into your Google Slides presentations. The free teacher account allows for 1 topic and 3 polls per event. Pricing.

Chrome Web Store

Don't let your students make bad presentations!

As a part of preparing our students for the world they are headed into, we should teach them how to make GOOD presentations. Slides full of text = BAD presentations!

Tips for most presentations:

• Use as little text as possible- tell us what we should to know
• No sentences (or nearly sentences), unless it's a quote- if we read it, we won't remember any of it
• Make images as large as possible
• Use a single large image instead of multiple small ones
• If using note cards, they should be in bullet point format and not scripted
• PRACTICE!!!! 

Resources:

• Echo Rivera's You. Yes, you. You're using too much text on your slides
• Death by PowerPoint presentation
• Lifewire's How to Lose an Audience and 10 Ways to Get Them Back
• Lifehack's 6 Secrets of Bad Presentations and How to Avoid Them
• RenderForest's 10 Dos and Don'ts for an Effective Presentation
• Edutopia's 8 Tips to Power-up your Classroom Presentations
• Video: How to Give an Awesome Presentation

For Teachers:
To make it easier to grade, have students create and turn in 2 products: 

1. a Google Slides presentation (based on the tips above) that will be presented live in class, and 
2. a Google Doc that includes all of the content, research, sources, etc. that you're looking for in the rubric. You can quickly grade the content from that Google Doc and the audience won't be bored to tears with a bad classroom presentation.

Please see your DLC (Penney Matos at CHS) for additional tips and support!

Powtoon FREE Teacher Accounts!

Powtoon is giving away FREE teacher accounts! 
Get yours ASAP before they run out!
https://www.powtoon.com/lp/back2school2017/

Google Slides Q & A -- Talk with your audience, not at them

Google Slides recently added a Q & A feature, allowing audience members to be active participants in presentations. Check out this blog post on the new feature. 

If you or your students present from an iPad or iPhone, check out this article. 

LucidChart's New Presentation Mode

LucidChart is a mind mapping tool that recently added a presentation feature.

Check out Richard Byrne's (Free Tech 4 Teachers) tips for educational uses.

To access LucidChart, 

- Click New à More à Connect more apps…

- Search for and add LucidChart

- Click New à More à LucidChart

- New documents will show up on your Drive list.