Week 6 Preparing an Interactive PowerPoint Lesson-Student Centered

Without a doubt, I got advice from the Duquesne University’s School of Education. This article mentioned how graduate students were learning, like me how to use available classroom technologies to teach. During this week number six, I could prepare an interactive Power Point lesson having the main focus “the  students”.  I was thinking about young students that barely can read on their native language. I started to concern a little bit about the amount of text I should be including on my presentation, and how to reach the class objective at the same time.

I knew that interactive lessons take the form of self-paced, student-controlled, individualized learning opportunities embedded with assessment events along the way, so I started to search in the web for extra materials (more examples) especially for children. I used Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator as my tools of choice for accessing the web. I included action buttons to assess student understanding. “By creating a simple question with several possible responses, PowerPoint transfers students either to new information (if correct), or to remedial information if additional instruction is necessary triggers a Hyperlink to advance to the feedback, and from there continue the lesson”. I could enable this interactive feedback using them in my presentation.  This and the use of hidden slides combined were ideal to produce an attractive and well executed effect with the sounds that needed to be played.  It would consider that I learned almost how to trick the usual sense of power point. To learn what power point was created for helped me to create a more attractive tool for my students.  I’ve used a summative (final) assessment while ensuring that students will complete the lesson, mastering all the learning objectives, and receiving some reward for their efforts.

“Once created using Kemp’s Model for Designing Effective Instruction, the presentation can be captured onto a” very light usage of memory and disk space, “1.44MB… unless there is an inordinate number of graphic images”.  Mine actually was a little bit heavier than that. I enjoyed learning an uncountable number of techniques to apply to interactive presentations using or not power point. Also I realize how this interactive presentation can be saved on show format and to be included in WebQuest too.

I found this video targeted to teachers (with only a basic knowledge of PowerPoint) who would like to use PowerPoint as an interactive tool in their classrooms. For example: To create multiple choice quizzes with automatic feedback based on which response is chosen. The URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUVbXCAqrs0&feature=related.  This template can be downloaded and adapted to our students’ needs.

All this interactive presentations reinforce our PBL, enhancing the engagement of our students. Take a look to this other example I found inspiring http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9JoGXxUooA&feature=related .  This is a tutorial that shows how to use the Big Wheel PowerPoint game. With really no preparation required, teachers can just have a sheet of vocabulary or review questions in their hand. Simply students need to click "Spin the Wheel" and total up the points in the columns on the right. There is also a version called “Big Wheel Elementary” that is the same game except that it has smaller numbers on the wheel.

This week I learned how there are lots of interactive presentations ready to be used by us. Some of this donated by other teachers or experts on power point too. It is really amazing the amount of time they are dedicating to create them and then just letting others benefit from them. At the end, when using one of those templates, we should at least recognize the credit they deserve.

Best Regards

Aida