Week 11

Reflection: There are many presentation tools that will enrich and benefit my students, their parents, and other teachers. Some of these presentation tools are PowerPoint and Google Presentations. These programs are helpful in creating presentations that can be used over and over again and are easy to share with others. Picasa, PowerPoint, and Google Presentations will help me teach my students in many different ways. PowerPoint can be used to create games like Jeopardy for a fun and interactive review game. PowerPoint can also be used to simply present information that can include pictures, text, audio and video. Google Presentations can be used basicly the same way as PowerPoint but it is much easier to collaborate with other people while creating it and publish it online than PowerPoint is. I will instruct and suggest that my students use Google Presentations if they are creating a presentation for a group project or assignment. This enables the students to work together without having to get together physically. If I ask my students to do a project or assignment using digital photos I will teach them how to use Picasa photo editing tool because it is very user friendly and accessible. It is easy to share your edited photos online with others as well. I will use Picasa to edit my own photos when I use digital pictures in my class for instructions, roll, presentations, books, posters etc. the pictures will then look more professional than just regular photos. These tools will help me help my colleagues and other students. I will use PowerPoint if I am giving a presentation to my colleagues or directing a meeting. If I have created a review game like Jeopardy for my class and another teacher would like to utilize it, it is very easy to just save it to a disk so they can have their own copy of it. I will use Google Presentations with other teachers if we are building our curriculum lessons and would all like to use the same lesson. Instead of just one person dominating the project and everyone else mooching off them, we can all work together and collaborate at our own time on our own computer. The presentation would be much better because several people included their ideas and knowledge rather than just one. In many classrooms, teachers are sticking to classic ways of teaching using the blackboard, maybe transparencies, if their lucky a movie clip here and there. I plan on embracing on the technology tools that I have available including Picasa, PowerPoint, and Google Presentations to reach beyond expectations, empowering my students to learn the tools and benefit from their functions. These tools present information in very visual forms which can empower students alone. I have listed multiple benefits of these tools but some of the drawbacks can include the amount of time invested in using them. Sometimes it is easy to get so involved in creating a presentation that you don't realize 4 hours have gone by, in this case I don't think that the presentation is necessarily serving its function properly. If I use Picasa to edit photos and post them on the web it is crucial that the albums are private or don't include any personal information or photos of students that might spread across the internet. Students, teachers, and parents have the right to privacy and pictures shouldn't be published of whatever, wherever. Picasa, PowerPoint, and Google Presentations are all very useful tools that will benefit me, my students, parents, and colleagues.

Video: I thought that the video was quite entertaining because everyone has seen those presentations that are just awful. Each slide includes massive amounts of information, the background hurts your eyes, and half their words are spelled wrong. I think that when creating a PowerPoint everyone should know that 1. You don't have to put every word you are going to say on the slide. 2. Use spell checker 3. Avoid excessive bullet points. 4. Don't use bold or obnoxious color schemes. 5. Less data is MORE. 6. Animations- use them carefully and not too many, if any at all. 7. Font analysis- use fonts that are readable and fit the data of your presentation. When a presentation is made following these guidelines it will be more understandable for your viewer and won't be embarrassing to you or your colleagues.