Thinking Outside the (Automatically Inserted Text) Box

Tweet

As the trimester winds down and I try to get those dreaded marks pulled together for reports, I decided to use the remaining lessons to tackle two seemingly simple skills with my Year 7 students. Namely, online searching and creating a presentation. For this assignment, students are responsible for researching technology within a particular topic or focus (e.g. written communication or entertainment) and are meant to compare how today's available technologies compare with what was available to their parents when they were their age. We spent one lesson learning and practicing some search strategies and looking at do's and don't's (those are incredibly awkward words to type, btw) of presentations (primarily, at this point, focused on simple but effective slide creation and not presentation content). We used a number of resources that I solicited through my PLN of tweeps including Google's 'How Search Works' video (seen below), the Google for Educators site, World's Worst Powerpoint, and Garr Reynold's slide creation tips from his Presentation Zen website.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

This was meant to be a quick overview of everything and then follow ups would be set for the subsequent lessons, of which there are a total of four scheduled for researching, creating, and practicing the presentation. As the first lesson for research rolled around, I introduced the topic which they would have to research and explained that they would be making a presentation with the information they find. I explained that for this lesson they should focus only on researching their topic so that they could become mini-experts for their presentation. As I did the rounds of the classroom to check how the students were doing with their research, I saw quite a few students with PowerPoint open, Google images pasted in and bullet pointed lists beginning to fill their slides. Then, one of my students asked, "Can I just make the presentation and then figure out what to say?" My heart sank. I had obviously failed to get my point across effectively.

Making boring PowerPoint slides is not only ingrained in the students' minds, it's ingrained right into the software. PowerPoint (or Keynote for all you Mac users), with its prepared text boxes and bullets, makes it too easy for students (or, let's be fair, adults too) to just fill in the templates that they give you. People, especially most students, are very happy to take the easiest route when doing anything (if you have actual facts to support this claim, please let me know) and filling in a template is easy. The trouble is, like with so many things in life, the easiest way is not always the best or most interesting way of doing something.

As the end of the lesson was approaching, I decided that the easiest strategy for this was to do something a little strange in a unit devoted to creating a PowerPoint presentation...I banned PowerPoint. I told the students that I did not want to see PowerPoint on any of their screens for the rest of the lesson. This "solution" worked for the last part of this class but I knew that I would need to follow up with something to really help this all sink in the next lesson.

So the next lesson rolled around and I was able to 'borrow' Jago Gazendam's idea from our COETAIL session on Saturday and we walked through the idea of finding a Creative Commonspicture that represents the feeling of a word rather than a very literal interpretation of the word. After walking through how to do this with one example (including explanations of all the different kinds of licences of Creative Commons), I got the students to repeat this for the title page of their presentations and, compared to the previous lesson, the results were night and day.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="400" caption="From Flickr by freeflyer09"][/caption]

The students chose visually interesting, subject appropriate, and licence allowable images and, from the examples I saw, they even managed to give appropriate credit to the image creators. I can only hope that this turnaround continues as they carry on with the creation of their presentations.

In reflection on these lessons this week, I've learned a couple of things. Firstly, I have, sadly, reached that point in my life where I'm more than old enough to be my students' parents. More importantly however, habits are tough enough to break on your own, let alone in other people. Sometimes, you need to take a big step back and look at something in a different way to see things in a fresh, new way. Time to start thinking outside the automatically inserted text box.