7 Steps to a Flat Classroom: The Presentation

I've given several presentations lately and, although I'm posting these on my personal wiki, I thought some of you would like to see the slides.


Flat Classroom Mashup/ 7 Steps to a Flat Classroom

| View | Upload your own

This was given last night at the Discovery Educators presentation.

Julie and I talking about Flat Classroom 2007 as we mashup Pink and Friedman

If you want to hear Julie Lindsay and I present the first part of this, I have an elluminate recording from today when she and I presented to some teachers in North Carolina. You'll hear Julie and I talk about this year's Flat Classroom project structure, organization, and methods.

You can see all of my slideshows on slideshare - http://www.slideshare.net/coolcatteacher/slideshows.

Putting a little Zen in It
I've been reworking all of my presentations (and changing how I teach presentations), based upon Garr Reynolds' amazing book Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter).

Don't be put off by how many slides some of my presentations have, it is more slides, less talking, actually. Think of it as if you're a live narrator for a documentary!

If you look at my presentation from last Tuesday at the Center for Quality Teaching and Learning, the first 14 slides literally take 1 minute and 20 seconds. I did them for my students as a demonstration -- and they agreed it is a much better way to present, although it is very different!

It is about using graphically appealing slides along with two other items: speakers notes (detailed notes for me-- although I usually practice to the point I don't need them) and handouts (I like to use Google notebook -- see mine from last Tuesday.)

Garr talks about not producing "sliduments" but have a "document" to hand out.

My intro:

| View | Upload your own

How I teach Presentation Zen

1. Demonstrate the technique -- I have my students time my intro of myself and ask them to guess how many slides I use.
2. Elicit emotion with at least one slide - I end the presentation with my picture of the shark (slide #14).
3. We talk about the principle of thirds, share lots of examples, talk about Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity, and just look at a lot of Garr's work. We also talk about full bleeding off of the page.
   
4. We discuss scripting and storyboarding.
5. I give them super sticky notes and the storyboard pages. They brainstorm about their topic with their group and sketch out ideas on the sticky notes -- most use walls or desks to stick them in the order that they think they want. When they are done and have settled on the order, I have them stick it on the storyboard pages and flesh it out a little more. (This is why you need the supersticky notes!)
6. THEN, they go into PowerPoint -- not before!

You can imagine -- right now my walls have sticky notes ALL OVER THEM! But, we're getting some great presentations for me to share with you next week!

Slideshows aren't Downloadable!
I've had some people e-mail me about downloading my slideshows. As much as I'd love to give them away, I am now using istockphoto for some of the graphics and need to make sure that I respect the agreement that I make with the photographers there. So, I cannot GIVE them to you to present, however, I CAN share them with you to give you your own ideas. (And yes, I still use creative commons search, however, istock photo is just so FAST and they have great pictures.)

I wish there was a way to easily mark or delineate the slides I can give you and those that are the copyrighted pictures... that is the struggle with these things!

tag: Garr Reynolds, presentation zen, Julie Lindsay, flat classroom, flatclassroom, presentations, education, teaching, coolcatteacher, innovation, teacher