This video discusses strategies for teaching students skills needed for making presentations
The purpose of this video is to provide specific ideas and strategies teachers can use to teach
students skills for designing and delivering effective presentations.
Presentation skills are part of the English language arts standards within the Common
Core State Standards.
When students provide classroom presentations, it can encourage purposeful speaking and engaged
listening.
During presentations, students demonstrate content knowledge, but the skills that go
into preparing for that presentation, like writing with a purpose and for an audience
are useful across content areas.
In addition, integrating a range of technology tools into presentations, supports varied
learners, such as developing skills and creating effective presentations.
Specifically, the opportunity to make presentations provides students with multiple means of expression.
However, we shouldn't take for granted that students know how to either make presentations,
or the technology within presentations.
Thus, students can be taught to use technology tools to create multimedia presentations in
the following ways:
First, it is important to provide students with direct instruction in presentation methods.
One strategy is for you to use a think-aloud strategy, where you demonstrate your techniques
for incorporating digital tools, such as Google Docs, Powerpoint, and the interactive white
board into your presentations.
Another strategy is to focus explicit instruction on how to use specific tools, which might
be technology-based, during your presentations.
For example, you can help your students share exemplary audio and video presentations, pointing
out tools and methods used by presenters.
Demonstrate the functionality of various tools during live presentations.
Finally, give students a set of criteria to consider when selecting technology-based presentation
tools.
Because some of your students are more adept at designing and giving presentations, it
is important to differentiate instruction by providing step-by-step tutorials and models
for various presentation tools.
This allows more proficient students to explore additional resources available online.
It is important for you, as the teacher, to help your students present for a variety of
purposes.
This includes discussing and providing models for different types of presentations—highlighting
how tone, diction, and style are tied to the function of the presentation.
You can help your students develop strategies for designing and delivering presentations
in different scenarios.
Have your students compare video clips of a descriptive or informative presentation,
and then compare it to a video of a persuasive presentation, like an attorney's closing arguments
to a jury.
Engage and expand your students' concept of audience by highlighting how a presentation
with the same purpose would vary for a different audience: formal versus informal, peer versus
adult, academic versus personal.
Have students present the same basic talk in multiple iterations, each with a different
purpose—to persuade, to describe, to analyze, to inform—and provide them opportunity to
give these presentations across content areas.
It's extremely important to have your students use a rubric, or a feedback form, to provide
their classmates with feedback after their presentation.
Add elements of speaking and listening to the latter stages of the writing process,
which includes publishing, sharing and evaluating.
You can support your students' presentation skills within the writing process.
Share early outlines of presentations and rehearse them with teachers, peers, and other
adults, to gather feedback and suggestions.
Publish the students' work as podcasts, or record in-class presentations to build a lecture,
or storytelling series.
Evaluate the presenting student, using a video or audio annotation tool, and give a live
play-by-play of the recorded presentation.
You can also publish and share presentations to extend the community beyond the classroom
with blogs, video logs, audio or video recorded live presentations, podcasts, and annotated
audio/video, with mechanisms for giving feedback to the student.
Pause here, and consider the following in your notes, or mind.
To what extent have you taught students specific strategies for presenting with technology?
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