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Friday 9 March 2012

Student presentations in the classroom

I widely use presentations in the classroom, created both by me and my students. While PowerPoint is still the most popular tool among students, new tools and applications are getting used more and more often.

Today I had a lesson with my 18 year old students who had to prepare a presentation about a personality in the computer world.  For those who use Solutions by Oxford University Press, I can add that it was a lesson in Unit 8 about the biographies of remarkable internet personalities.

One of the tools that was used for creating the presentations was present.me. Those students who used the tool claimed that it was really easy to use but they were a little flustered by having to wait for the PowerPoint slides to be processed. For some of them it took long hours. They also realised that it matters very much what kind of a microphone you have - the in-built laptop mikes produce worse sound than the portable ones.

On the whole, they loved working with present.me because it was a more challenging tool than the ones they had been using so far and it produced more impressive and gratifying results than other tools.

Take a look at the presentation made by my student Monta.


Another tool that has gained popularity among my students is Prezi.

Below is the presentation made by Renate about one of the leading figures in the Latvian social networking world Lauris Liberts who has created frype.com. The presentation was accompanied by well-prepared oral comments which unfortunately you cannot see nor hear.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for mentioning Present.me and please accept my apologies for the slow conversion times your students have been experiencing. We have a huge number of updates coming in April, along with a new conversion process that's superfast!
All the best
Spencer

Baiba said...

Great to hear from you, thanks!
Did I mention that my students loved the tool?! They discovered they could use it easily and got carried away instantly. Now I believe they are going to use it for each and every presentation they will make in the nearest future :)

Tyson Seburn said...

I like that you've used these tools with your students. I haven't yet, but something to think about for the future.

I'm not sure why it took so long for your students to upload PPTx to present.me. Mine, which was about 1.5MB in total, took a few minutes only.

Baiba said...

Oh, then it must be that they uploaded older PPT which is still in wide use here. This explains the delay, perhaps...

Ann said...

Hi Baiba,
Thought that teachers on the TeachingEnglish facebook page would find this really helpful and your post "Put your story on the cube" so I've just linked to them if you'd like to check for comments.

Please feel free to post on the page whenever you have anything you'd like to share.

Best,

Ann