Digital Story Telling...Week 4

As I continue through this class, I enjoy learning more everyweek as my classmates and I are introduced to new tools and valuable books, learning material. What I am enjoying most is that we are being provided with opportunities to create and share projects that we can use in our classrooms to enhance our student instruction. Learning about ideaology that can change the way we teach and learn, but more importantly change the way our students learn and share knowledge. I have been very pleased with text selections for this course, Presentation Zen and Digitales, because they are timely and forthright in their explanation of information.

What has really helped me this week is a culmantion of the first three combined thusfar, seeing the preparation for a presentation as mission of organization. I have become open the idea that a great presentation does not have to be set in the traditional design format, but requires as much work if not more than the traditional design format 1-7-7. As someone who majored in Mass Media Communications in undergraduate, the rule for preparing a slide show was almost like the Gospel. If you did not have "detailed" slides, you had not prepared properly and it reflected poorly on you as a presenter.

The truth is that now is the time when we need to think differently about what makes a powerful statement when we are engaging an audience. We need to through out the "rule" book for a broken system and days of bullet points and tons of text we used to attempt to create a stunning effect and look for ways to affect our audience instead.

This week, as with every week, I ask myself what did I learn and how is it going to change the manner in which I carry out tasks in my classroom and other areas of my life? Quite simply, when it comes to presentations I am going to use what I learned about simplifying what I put on a slide and what I choose to include in a presentation. A simplified presentation with a powerful message that can be heard without visual noise as a distraction is my goal.