Saturday, September 26, 2015

Student Presentation Apps

Today was my district's annual iDevice Mini-Conference. I always love these conferences because of all the learning and sharing. There are so many good ideas that come from them! I facilitated two sessions on student presentations. Because of the focus on iDevices, I shared several apps that I love to use for helping students share their learning.

Rather than just focus on tools, I like to discuss ways to help students be better presenters. My inspiration comes from a blog post by Lisa Nielsen called Stop Letting Good Students Do Bad Presentations.  She outlines 6 tips teachers can use to help students be better presenters. I think these tips are more important than learning the apps. It doesn't matter how well students use the app or how easy the app is, if they present their content poorly all the hard work is lost.

My beginners session focused on 3 basic apps that are simple enough for students and teachers to transition from the idea of PowerPoint to doing the same style presentations on an iPad. The session handout can be downloaded here and the presentation is below.


Student Presentation Basics - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

The three apps I focused on for this session are

In the advanced session I also added information about a new presenting method I absolutely love called PechaKucha. PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where students show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and students talk along to the images. This helps them be concise and stay on topic. It forces them to let pictures tell their story.

The session handout can be downloaded here and the presentation is embedded below.


Engaging Student Presentations - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

The three apps I focused on for this session were specifically chosen because they don't follow the traditional slideshow format typically used in PowerPoint.
These are some simply, yet powerful apps that can really help students be creative and show their learning.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Mark.

    Your blog post provides the novice techno teacher (me!) with valuable information. I used my first computer in 1981 - a big main frame - and since then, I have had a tough time keeping up with technological advancements. It's nice to have a site like yours that provides an overview of cutting edge resources for teachers and students alike.

    Thank you for providing hot links to the products (APPS) you have reviewed. Even though I teach juniors and seniors, I think they would enjoy using Sock Puppets. My class is extremely rigorous, and I sometimes forget that learning comes in many fun forms. I will give it a try during the next few weeks.

    Question: How do you find time to update your blog? Do you keep a tight writing schedule?

    By the way, I am enjoying the blogging class.

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    1. Thanks for reading my blog! How often I write on my blog varies. Sometimes I'm working with a teacher or preparing a workshop and I'll write on my blog as part of that preparation. In that way it reflects my learning. Other times I'll get a bee in my bonnet and just want to write about something that I've been thinking about. In that case I create a post as soon as I can before that urgency wears off.

      I have a list of blog topics in my to do list. As I find time I write about those various ideas. Unfortunately those ideas come to me faster than I'm able to put them down on a blog post!

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