Using presentations in education - moving beyond powerpoint

I have started planning towards a workshop on different ways to use powerpoint and other forms of ICT assisted presentation. The main objective is to showcase a few different ways to make ICT presentations more interesting and to provide alternatives to ‘death by bullet points’.

The other major objective is for tutors to realise that they do not need to do the work of preparing presentations but that the examples could be introduced to students. Students can then move ahead to conceptualise, prepare, construct & present the material. It makes use of the concept of the student being ‘the producer, not just a consumer’.

To start with, a couple of alternative ways to present using powerpoint can be discussed. These include using powerpoint for publishing, as a backdrop for drama productions, pecha kucha and other similar methods.

Then an introduction to Web 2.0 based presentation sites via exploration of webtools4u2use and examples in readand writeweb, cogdogroo, worsefor wear and boxoftricks. This is followed by a brief look at presentations on prezi and animoto.

In short, the workshop was to encourage tutors to be more aware of the tools, available via the web, to engage their students in using the vernacular they are familiar with to express themselves.

The dialogue which follows student presentations also provide important learning opportunities. I find that it is important to facilitate student reflection on each presentation and sometimes to summarise or make links/applications on the white board while students are debriefing. This not only provides notes for future discussion and work but also models the process of reflection.