Week #3 in CEDO 530

Since the power went out last night I was not able to post. Luckily I wrote this in Word and now I can just copy, paste!

With a pretty awesome thunderstorm raging on in the background I’ll need to be brief incase the power goes out, but this week in CEDO 530 we took a look at multiple ways of planning for and executing presentations.  Were as the book Presentation Zen started off being a little philosophical in the beginning, now we are totally into the nuts and bolts section of the text.  There is an absolute ton of great tips in chapter 6 that give you a very quick introduction to the many different facets of design.  This turning from philosophy to practice has made the book endlessly more enjoyable and practical. 

In DigiTales we are looking at the different steps needed to make a proper digital story.  The checklist seems very good and I look forward to using it with my students when they create digital stories or projects.  To help facilitate quick creation of digital stories we also investigated the website animoto.  Animoto is a great website that instantaneously creates very professional slide shows using only the music you upload and the pictures that you provide.  This seems to be a great system for displaying a series of pictures if you do not have an artistic vision that you want complete control over.

The last tool we explored this week was Pecha Kucha, a method of presenting 20 power point slides in 20 seconds each.  It is structured in a way to maximize the presenter’s effectiveness and minimize the death by power point that happens quite frequently in meetings.  It will be fun to try this out in coming weeks.

CEDO 530 Week #2

This week in CEDO 530 we are looking at presentations and how they are planned and how they can go awry.  We looked at Voice Thread a lot this week and you can see two small examples of my trying it out below:






Voice Threads seem to have a lot of use when commenting on presentations or pictures.  Our group had a fun time with playing with the software.

Also this week we needed to tie projects that we were doing or wanted to do to state and national standards.  You can see my project list below and also take a look at what standards I'm trying to hit. You can even see a description of the House Project that I ran last night and the Cardboard Boat Regatta I'm running tomorrow.


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eRFdd-YRaNtkA2__J1kvcF3d943-YZC55zOAqcouWNo/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPPDm-kL

It was interesting how many different sets of standards my group members and I came up with to use in this project.  It makes me realize that while a large majority of the content of the standards is the same, we have a long way to go before we have one set of standards that everyone in the country uses exclusively.

Well, that is about it.  I'm off to 6 Flags for the annual "Physics Day" field trip.  I love being a teacher.

Starting CEDO 530: Digital Story Telling

This week we started up Digital Story Telling.  It seems like it will be a very useful class in that we are not just making iMovies and WMA files, but we are examining what makes a great story and how do we best convey that story to others.  I am very excited that we are examining "Death by Powerpoint" (the destruction of a presentation by the use of poor visual aides) and "Slideuments" (Over informative Powerpoints / Handouts) as I have been wanting to revamp some of my AP Physics presentations as they are too much information thrown at the students all at once.

To help us on our quest for perfection in presentation we have the books Presentation Zen and Digitales.  I have used the Digitales website (http://www.digitales.us/) with great success in the past and I hope that the book will be just as useful as the website.  Presentation Zen excites me as I love the idea of simplifying and streamlining activities I do to make them more effective and less time consuming

Overall I hope to learn about the ways we can make our jobs easier and more effective when we are presenting information to students.