There are so many practical applications for online presentations! It will be quite advantageous for me to have a few ‘go-to’ tools to easily create content to support what I do during the school day. As with so much of technology, it is often difficult to find the time to thoroughly investigate the tools available. After working with ThingLink and Present.me, studying best practices and viewing lots of examples I can add more tools to the arsenal, but I still have more to explore and learn about them.
I was happy to work with ThingLink this week. At ISTE this past summer I spoke with several people at length about what you can do with ThingLink and I have been meaning to try it ever since. I used it for a project I’ve had in mind, a way to share some of my lessons with my in-district colleagues. In a nutshell, each year we participate in a program with our 2nd grade students where we read from a prescribed list of 15 books, and the books change each year. Although we all use the same books we don’t have many opportunities to meet during the school year so we don’t always have the chance to share lesson ideas. I created a ThingLink to link lesson extensions to each title. I will share this with the rest of the librarians and show them how to add content. I also want to add my lesson plan documents – I think I can store them in Google Drive or Dropbox and use those links but I haven’t tried that yet (we are just starting this year’s program so we haven’t designed many lessons yet.)
Thinglink will be a great resource to use with students as well as teachers. The visual design will work very well for me when I’m collecting resources for the students. I was thinking of using a picture of my new maker space with links to various project ideas and activities they can try in each area. For student presentations, one fourth grade teacher is in the middle of a project about Pennsylvania. It would be fun for the students to add the links with their information to a ThingLink map. Some of my students were disappointed not to find an entire book about Harrisburg or keystones. If they could use a dynamic tool like this perhaps they will be excited to share their information.
The narrated presentation had me struggling a bit. I have several areas where I’m hoping to add short videos to assist the students who need a little more repetitions. I also was considering using the assignment to create a ‘how to sign in’ presentation for students as we begin Maker Mondays or a shelving tutorial for parent volunteers. However, I really wanted to incorporate the guidelines and techniques we read about this week, and many of my ideas would have required busy slides or screenshots of google forms. So I chose to focus on the connection between the call numbers on the books and their location in the Library. I review this constantly across every grade and some students just don’t grasp the concept. I’m hoping that following these best practices of clear and properly colored graphics might help. I definitely plan on making more narrated presentations myself. I created a few last year but now that I’m getting more familiar with the process I need to find a way to keep presentations organized so I can keep track of what is available. I have to look a little further into it for students. I really like the idea of having students narrate instead of write. For library assignments I’m interested in their content and process and not their grammar and spelling. I also hope to be able to share more student work with parents and narrated student presentations will meet that need as well.
I was happy to work with ThingLink this week. At ISTE this past summer I spoke with several people at length about what you can do with ThingLink and I have been meaning to try it ever since. I used it for a project I’ve had in mind, a way to share some of my lessons with my in-district colleagues. In a nutshell, each year we participate in a program with our 2nd grade students where we read from a prescribed list of 15 books, and the books change each year. Although we all use the same books we don’t have many opportunities to meet during the school year so we don’t always have the chance to share lesson ideas. I created a ThingLink to link lesson extensions to each title. I will share this with the rest of the librarians and show them how to add content. I also want to add my lesson plan documents – I think I can store them in Google Drive or Dropbox and use those links but I haven’t tried that yet (we are just starting this year’s program so we haven’t designed many lessons yet.)
Thinglink will be a great resource to use with students as well as teachers. The visual design will work very well for me when I’m collecting resources for the students. I was thinking of using a picture of my new maker space with links to various project ideas and activities they can try in each area. For student presentations, one fourth grade teacher is in the middle of a project about Pennsylvania. It would be fun for the students to add the links with their information to a ThingLink map. Some of my students were disappointed not to find an entire book about Harrisburg or keystones. If they could use a dynamic tool like this perhaps they will be excited to share their information.
The narrated presentation had me struggling a bit. I have several areas where I’m hoping to add short videos to assist the students who need a little more repetitions. I also was considering using the assignment to create a ‘how to sign in’ presentation for students as we begin Maker Mondays or a shelving tutorial for parent volunteers. However, I really wanted to incorporate the guidelines and techniques we read about this week, and many of my ideas would have required busy slides or screenshots of google forms. So I chose to focus on the connection between the call numbers on the books and their location in the Library. I review this constantly across every grade and some students just don’t grasp the concept. I’m hoping that following these best practices of clear and properly colored graphics might help. I definitely plan on making more narrated presentations myself. I created a few last year but now that I’m getting more familiar with the process I need to find a way to keep presentations organized so I can keep track of what is available. I have to look a little further into it for students. I really like the idea of having students narrate instead of write. For library assignments I’m interested in their content and process and not their grammar and spelling. I also hope to be able to share more student work with parents and narrated student presentations will meet that need as well.