EdTech Camp: Where did Presentations Go?

During our EdTech Camp, we began thinking about designing a workshop that would promote the idea of bringing back presentations.

In our break out room. this idea sparked from our observations as a group that teachers were not including many presentations in their practice, if at all. As pre-service teachers, we feel that presentations are an important form of education that can help build integral life skills. Several group members, including myself, felt that presentations help with public speaking, ownership of work, communication, and presentation planning skills. Presenting in front of your peers and teacher can also help build confidence.

We discussed why presentations are not happening as much, and we thought about a few contributing factors. Firstly, it takes a lot of time to help prepare students for presenting, especially since they are not used to it. Class time should be given to complete research, create the presentation, and then actual presentation time. Additionally, we need to scaffold all these steps, as discussions with students need to be had regarding how to deal with nervousness, speak confidently, and deliver a quality presentation. We also talked about how it would be critical to teach kids how to be good audience members when other students are presenting. Overall, the time it takes to scaffold these skills is a drawback, but we decided that it is absolutely vital for students to get this experience in school. Kids are nervous to present, but if they never do it, their anxiety is just going to get worse.

We discussed that incorporating presentations would be most applicable starting at the middle school level. In elementary school, they are learning critical communication with friends, including what is appropriate, and how to respect other kids. Once kids reach middle school, it is time to start building public speaking skills, and teaching kids that it is important to know how to be able to properly communicate.

We also talked about the different types of technologies that would be useful to show kids. We suggested Canva, PowerPoint, as well as polling technologies, such as slido and mentimeter.

Let me know in the comments how you would scaffold presentations in your classroom!

Cheers,

Rylie