Teaching Languages with Web 2.0 Technology
Posts tagged technology
The 10/20/30 PowerPoint Rule.
Sep 1st
If you haven’t heard about it, Guy Kawasaki coined a clever little expression a while back to help folk improve their PowerPoint presentations. He called it the 10, 20, 30 rule.
Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/
- 10 – No more than ten slides in your presentation. This key number is supposed to help focus your audiences minds on your message, rather than your slides.
- 20 – If you have a one hour meeting, aim to finish your slides in no more than 20 minutes. What with technical problems, questions and chatting, you’ll end up running out of time and going too fast at the end if you try to cram in too much.
- 30 – No font size smaller than 30. If you want your audience to be able to read your slides (you do!) then make sure your text is legible. If you find yourself trying to use a smaller font to squeeze it all in, ask yourself:
- do you need all that text anyway?
- shouldn’t the main message come from you, not your slides?
- wouldn’t it be better to spread the information over more than one slide?
What made me decide to point all this out here though is because I found a nice little presentation on SlideShare today by Cory O’Brien that explains all of this in a nice, visual way. Have a look:
Guy even goes as far as giving us a suggested theme of what should go on each slide. Although I think this is far more relevant to marketers and business-people, I think it’s worth bearing in mind for education, too (and of course it works excellently for a business English teacher.) You can see Guy’s suggestions on Cory’s slide number 3 above. Better still, why not listen to it from the horses mouth Guy himself:
So, there we have it. If I haven’t convinced you, I hope Guy has!
Got a great PowerPoint tip? Is there a mnemonic-like “rule” you tell yourelf before starting to plan a presentation? Be sure to tell us about it in the comments section below! 
All the best and happy presenting!
Seth.
Blogging with EFL Students – Part 1 – Setting Up a Blog
Jul 17th
Blogging is a great way to allow your EFL students a little space to be creative, talk to a “real” audience and connect with other learners.
This year at the high-school I work at, Martino Martini, in Mezzolombardo, Italy, we’ve been experimenting with using student blogs as a kind of reflective journal to discuss things we’ve learnt in class. We’ve also started a class blog as a digital noticeboard for pasting slides I’ve used in class, homework reminders and examples of great work from within the class.
Although they are quite specific to the needs of my students (and trainee teachers,) I’ve decided to share the slides I use to teach blogging.I hope they can be helpful to other teachers and teacher-trainers, too.
So, this will be the first in a series of three presentations to help EFL students and teachers learn how to blog and how to use Blogger. In these slides I go through the basics of what blogging is all about and show how to set up a Blogger account, using screenshots from Blogger itself.
I hope these slides will help you and your students get started with this great communicative tool! If you have any questions, or have any advice of your own about setting up a blog to use with students, be sure to leave a comment to tell us about it
p.s. I know, I know what you’re thinking. This presentation breaks many, if not all the “rules” I shared in my Death By PowerPoint – and How to Avoid It post I wrote recently. My only defence is that I wrote this guide about 18 months ago, before I’d spent time studying how to improve presentations. Tell you what, I’ll make a promise. If I get round to updating these slides, I promise to upload the improved version here, okay?!
All the best,
Seth.
My Students’ Social Science Video
May 8th
This video is the fruit of a long project my 4th year students have been working on this year. The video is called: “A vision of Italian Students today - Our Thoughts.”
The video was entirely produced by my students. We posted this as a reply to Prof. Mike Wesch’s video “A Vision Of Students Today,” which you can see at the bottom of this post.
Prof. Wesch’s video discusses the old-fashioned methods many teachers still use in class. If you are an educator and you haven’t seen it yet, you really should. My students have explored the same theme in this video.
Everything you see in this video was written, organised, filmed and publicised (at our school) by the students of our class. This includes the writing of questions, posting them to an online survey host. The statistics quoted in the second part of the video are based on the online questionnaire written entirely by the class. We then turned all the data into the script for our video. Oh, and English is our second language too!
Seeing as the results of our survey showed that by far the most popular means of communication in the school is via SMS, we did an experiment and organised the creation of our Flash Cards via SMS. This is why you’ll see some of the flash cards more than once!
The whole school was invited to reply to our survey, which asked what our schoolmates attitudes are to the Italian education system. I think you’ll agree, the results are surprising in more ways than one.
Here’s the (fantastic) video produced by my students:
And here is Prof. Wesch’s Original:
Interactive White Boards – An Intro
May 4th
This year I have organised a series of ICT and Web 2.0 training semninars for the Office of Foreign Languages and Bi-lingualism in Alto Adige (Italy.) They run 2 language libraries, the MediaTeca in Merano and the Multilanguage Centre in Bolzano. This is a short introduction to IWBs, or Interactive White Boards that I will be presenting today.
The presentation is in 4 parts; A quick look at research intro IWB use in language teaching; some Do’s and Don’ts when using IWBs, written by myself, a great film from www.teachers.tv plus, best of all, some practical ideas from my friends and colleagues on Twitter. The presentation also looks at websites suitable for IWB use, as well as pointing out some of the types of IWB software available for language teaching.
Hope that it can be useful to you too!
What Shall We Do With An IWB?
View more presentations from Seth Dickens.
High School Digme Courses Inspire
May 1st
Minneapolis Roosevelt High School students have been using blogs, Twitter, wikis, video, podcasts and other digital media in their English lessons.
At the University of Minnesota they have been looking at how the Roosevelt High School “Digme” programme has given students an opportunity to engage with English lessons in a way they never did previously. Judging by some of the feedback in the video, the use of Web 2.0 tools has inspired the students so much that they now really look forward to their English lessons.
Apart from mygeneral interest in the use of ICT in education, this program has really grabbed my attention as the school seems to be doing almost exactly the same kind of activity that I’ve been doing with my students this year at Martino Martini in Italy. I too have been using Twitter to facilitate e-twinning, podcasts and voice recordings to encourage oral fluency videos of science experiments and a social studies video to enthuse the students and encourage them to use the target language.I have also been using a wiki to co-ordinate the whole programme and give teachers, students and parents one central place to check up on the latest classroom activities.
In short, they’re doing just what I’m doing. It’s nice to know that you’re heading in the right direction!
Have a look at this video of the U.S. students to see how positive they seem about the whole project.
Video Comparison – €3000+ IWB or €50- IWB?
Apr 15th
I stumbled across this handy, home-made video comparison of the €3000+ Smart Interactive White Board and the €50 or so Wiimote Whiteboard the other day. As it’s done from the perspective of teachers I think it’s findings, both positive and negative, about the Wiimote board are really interesting.
Best,
Seth
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