DigitaLang » Lesson Ideas

Death By PowerPoint (and how to avoid it!)

Seth — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:12:00 +0000

I’m sure at some point in your career you have been bored to tears by a PowerPoint presentation. Let’s face it, who hasn’t! The same, I’m sure, is true for our students.

This is the presentation I gave at the IATEFL BESIG Rome mini-summer-conference in June 2010 to help teachers improve their PowerPoint presentations.

Death By PowerPoint – (and How To Avoid It)

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I was really pleased with the feedback I got from the presentation. It seemed to strike a chord with many of the teachers, school owners, writers and others who were present. (The poor folk had probably suffered too many terrible presentations in their careers!)

I hope these slides can help both people wishing to improve their own powerPoint presentations, teachers looking for a few ideas of ways to use PowerPoint with their classes and teachers who would like to do a lesson for their students about the basics of good slide design.

As always with “good” presentation slides, they only really work properly if they have a presenter there to explain what on earth they are talking about! I hope anyhow that you will find this useful. The presentation is split into two basic parts, an introduction which includes a lesson plan, and the second section (around slide number 50) which actually discusses the “Dos and Don’ts” when creating a PowerPoint presentation.

Have you got any extra hints and tips to share about how to create high-quality PowerPoint slides? Have you ever seen a truly awful presentation that you want to purge from your memory? Please leave us a comment to tell us about it. We’d love to hear from you!

All the best,
Seth.

Macmillan Open Dictionary

Seth — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:00:32 +0000

Hi there folks,

I just found out about a great new “user generated” online urban dictionary this evening and thought I’d share it with you all.

Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/

Here’s the description that Lifehacker gave it:

Macmillan’s new Open Dictionary allows anyone to suggest definitions for new words, similar to online Urban Dictionary. It differs in the fact that the definitions are carefully screened and handpicked, making it—in theory—more reliable and trustworthy.

I bet we could think of some great lesson ideas to use this with! Well, even if we can’t, Cambridge University Press has a few great ESOL dictionary lesson plans that will help get us started.

Direct link to the Macmillan Dictionary

Got any great dictionary lesson plans to use with language learners? Be sure to share them in the comments!

Seth

Introducing Yourself

Seth — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:29:49 +0000

Over on her excellent blog Kalinago English, Karenne Sylvester recently shared an excellent introductory lesson idea that I thought I’d try out.

Now I often do an introductory lesson where write a bunch of facts on the white board, in no apparent order. The students have to write questions in pairs that they think each fact is the answer to e.g.

7 Years - How long have you been married? ( or ) How long have you lived in Italy?( or ) How old is your daughter? ( or ) How long did you spend at university etc. The correct answer by the way is the second one.

Other Typical facts I write are things like:

snowboarding (What do you do in your free time?)

Bantry, Ireland (Where were you born?)

One (How many brothers or sisters have you got?) etc.

I like this activity as it provides a real motivation for the students to get to know me, write questions (and gives me a chance to check out their question formation), even if the task isn’t really an authentic one communicatively. I usually get the students to ask each other the questions that they wrote which are relevant after the activity, too. This adds a bit more conversation into the lesson.

Karenne suggests a similar activity, but she had the idea of using PowerPoint and images to give the students a little more information about you.

Here’s (one of) her ideas:

Brainstorm

Who are you?
Jot down quick notes on words that describe you and your life.

country of birth

countries lived in

marital status

family & siblings

current job

previous jobs

a job you dreamed of having

degree(s)/ other studies

hobbies and interests

group/ associations you belong to

places you’ve been on holiday

your age (number)

how long you’ve been teaching (number)

your house number

fave food /drink

fave music /musicians

fave book(s)

something unusual about you

anything else you feel like sharing

Procedure Option 2 (low tech)

Open up a PowerPoint document

Insert personal pictures from your computer

Search www.flickr.com or google images (cc-licensed*) for the images/maps you don’t have yourself – import these into your ppt.

Type the numbers in a large font.

Well, Karenne warned that it can take quite a while to prepare one of these “Who are you?” PowerPoint presentations, and she’s right! Several hours of photo scouting later I’ve got mine, here, all ready for my lesson tomorrow afternoon. Seeing as I’ve done it, I thought I’d post it here to share.

I wonder, can you guess what the pictures, numbers and other bits of information refer to?

Introduction To Me – Web Version

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