Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology

A Practical Guide for Teachers, by Teachers

Justin Reich, Tom Daccord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317476023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This practical, how-to guide makes it easy for teachers to incorporate the latest technology in their classes. Employing an informal workshop approach, the book avoids technical jargon and pays special attention to the needs of teachers who are expanding the use of computers in their classrooms. The authors focus on what teachers do and how they can do it better, and provide a wide variety of proven tools, tips, and methods for enhancing these activities with technology."Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology" provides extensively illustrated tutorials for a wide variety of software, online tools, and teaching techniques. It covers everything from lesson plans, to time management, how to show animation, blogging, podcasts, laptop strategies, and much, much more. In addition, periodic updates to the text will be available on the authors' website.

1 Lectures: Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Multimedia

DOI: 10.4324/9781315706160-1

• Introduction
• Multimedia Presentations with Images, Video, and Audio
• Searching for Images, Audio, and Video: How to Find All That Good Stuff in the First Place
• Using Video in the Classroom
• BrowserPoint: Simple Web Site Presentations with Tabbed Browsing
• Projectors: Sharing Your Screen with the Classroom
• Getting Data into Your Classroom
• Final Thoughts

Introduction

Professor Don Sadoway, instructor of a popular freshman Chemistry course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells his teaching assistants that the two most significant developments in education over the last generation have been computers and Sesame Street. Computers radically changed how we access and present information, but it was Sesame Street that redefined young people’s conception of learning. The generation of kids raised on Ernie and Elmo has come to believe that learning is meant to be loud, musical, colorful, and energetic. For better or for worse, teachers who want to reach out to the Big Bird generation need to use media to grab and sustain attention.

Older educational technologies have made it possible to use multimedia in the classroom for decades. Radios delivered audio, televisions displayed video, slide projectors showed images, and overhead projectors allowed reusable class notes. If you have ever used any of these tools, then you are already teaching with technology.

Computers offer three main advantages over these older tools. The first is that these media are now bundled, so only a single computer, rather than a cartful of equipment, is required to present everything. The second bonus is that computers connected to the Internet can find almost unlimited media for the classroom, much of it free. The final exciting benefit of computers is that they make it possible for you to create and modify your own multimedia presentations based on your passions, tailored to state standards, or focused on connections to your local community.

In many classrooms, the only computer in the room belongs to the teacher, and this book starts with an exploration of how a single computer attached to a projector can help teachers create more engaging lectures and presentations that reach out to students with a variety of learning styles. Great teachers use different media because the more ways you try to sneak information into the student brain, the more likely it is to actually get in and stay there.

Multimedia Presentations with Images, Video, and Audio

It’s one thing to read Robert Frost’s “Birches,” but it’s quite another to hear Frost read it (http://town.hall.org/radio/HarperAudio/012294_harp_ITH.html). It’s one thing to read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but it’s quite another to watch him deliver it (http://www.mlkonline.net/video.html). Educational technology allows teachers to bring the best sources from our disciplines easily into the classroom. When our voices start becoming the mumbles of Charlie Brown’s teacher, we can draw on other voices and images to energize our teaching and engage students with different learning styles.

Prepared Presentations with PowerPoint, Impress, and Keynote

Presentation software has become a standard accompaniment to lectures in education, business, government, and science. Microsoft PowerPoint is the most popular choice for presentation software, and we’ll use it as our example in this chapter. PowerPoint allows you to create slides that incorporate text, images, audio, and video to accompany lectures or discussions. PowerPoint presentations are easy to design, and pre-made presentations are easy to find on the Web.

Ten Ways to Enhance Lectures with PowerPoint

1. Include visual evidence in your lectures with images of art, artifacts, and architecture.
2. In discussing authors, include audio and video clips of them reading their work, which can be put directly into PowerPoint.
3. Include charts, graphs, and figures to supply statistical support to an argument.
4. Show a sequence of maps that demonstrate change over time.
5. Compile short examples of student writing to critique or edit.
6. Sum up the essential points or questions of a lecture in an outline slide.
7. Use charts, diagrams, and matrices to help students see relationships among ideas or information.
8. Use portraits or photographs so students can see pictures of the people you discuss.
9. Include cartoons or funny illustrations to inject humor into your presentation.
10. Use slides with titles and subheadings to help listeners follow the argument in longer lectures.

Warning!!

PowerPoint can be used to deliver some extremely bad teaching. The classic parody of terrible PowerPoint was created by Google programmer Peter Norvig, who rewrote the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation The complete results can be found at http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm, but even one slide says it all.

As you can see, technology has the capacity to make lectures and presentations much, much worse. Computers are like any other tool: used well they can create works of beauty, but used thoughtlessly they can ruin things as well.

This PowerPoint presentation demonstrates that technology is not always an improvement. Source: Courtesy of Peter Norvig.

Finding and Borrowing PowerPoint Presentations

Because PowerPoint has become so popular among teachers and professors, many PowerPoint presentations can be found for free on the Web. If you are just starting to teach with PowerPoint, borrowing one of these presentations can be a first step to bringing more multimedia into your teaching. Be sure to role model good citation by giving the original author credit when using someone else’s material.

Finding PowerPoint Presentations with Google's Advanced Search

We will have much more to say about searching with Google in Chapter 5, “Open Research,” but Google has the perfect feature for finding PowerPoint presentations on the Web. When you go to the Google homepage, http://www.google.com/, just to the right of the search bar you will see a small link for Advanced Search. Click on that link and you will see a variety of powerful search options. One of those search options is File Format, where you can choose to ask Mr. Google to look only for PowerPoint presentations. Select this option, put your search terms in at the top, and for many topics you will have links to dozens of ready-made PowerPoint presentations to choose from.

If you click on a link to a PowerPoint, your Web browser will ask you if you would like to open the PowerPoint or download it to your hard drive. If you click on View as HTML, you will be able to view the PowerPoint slides on a single Web page, though some of the animations, sounds, and other features will be disabled. This is a useful method for previewing PowerPoint slides and is much faster than downloading many presentations.

Google's Advanced Search provides the option of searching for only the PowerPoint file format. Source: Courtesy of Google.

Viewing PowerPoint Presentations in Class

Viewing PowerPoint presentations in class is quite straightforward. Open the PowerPoint presentation, and then hit F5 (only on PCs) or click Slide Show →View Show. You can advance the slides with a mouse click, with the space bar, or with the right arrow key. Use the left arrow key to go backward, or quit at any time by hitting Escape.

As you start using PowerPoint, you should practice projecting presentations before you show them in class to ensure that your text is large enough, that the images are high enough resolution to be clear, and that everything works the way you expect it to. Sit in the back of the room and make sure that everything can be seen, even from the cheap seats.

The PowerPoint Slide Show Viewer

To be able to edit PowerPoint slideshows, you need the very expensive PowerPoint software. Anyone, however, can view a slideshow using the free PowerPoint Viewer. You can download the viewer at, http://otfice.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/CD010798701033.aspx, or just Google search for “PowerPoint Viewer.” With these viewers, your students should be able to watch and print your PowerPoint presentations, even if they don’t own PowerPoint. You can also open PowerPoint presentations and edit them in OpenOffice.org’s Impress.

PowerPoint's Competition

There are several great alternatives to PowerPoint. For Apple users, Keynote in the iWork suite is a great alternative. And for everyone, Impress from http://www.openoffice.org/ is a free alternative to both. If getting PowerPoint or other Microsoft products for everyone is a financial burden for you or your students, switch to Impress and the OpenOffice suite. Support for movies and sounds inside the presentation is weaker in Impress, but if you are using just images and text, it’s pretty much just as good as the expensive stuff. If all the material for your presentations can be found on the Web, you might also consider using just tabbed browsing to create a BrowserPoint presentation, discussed toward the end of this chapter.

Featured Products

Keynote

Web site:http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/

Developer: Apple

Cost: Keynote comes as part of iWork, which retails for around $80. Apple’s version of PowerPoint, which many reviewers find better than PowerPoint.

Open Office impress

Web site:http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html

Developer: OpenOffice.org

Cost: Totally free

Open Office is an open-source project where software developers have created free versions of the standard suite of Microsoft Office or Apple products. It’s probably not quite as good as the retail stuff, but when you look at the price tag, it becomes a whole lot more attractive.

Microsoft PowerPoint

Web site:http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/default.aspxDeveloper: Microsoft

Cost: PowerPoint 2007 retails for $229; the full Microsoft Office suite costs $399.

The world’s standard presentation software.

______

Tech Specs: Microsoft PowerPoint

Set-Up Time: Finding and downloading PowerPoint presentations from the Web takes only minutes. Creating and modifying your own can be time-consuming, especially if you get finicky about details ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Lectures: Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Multimedia
• 2 Discussion and Communication
• 3 Note Taking and Organization
• 4 Guided Inquiry
• 5 Open Research
• 6 Homework
• 7 Writing
• 8 Student Presentations
• 9 Assessment and Grading
• 10 Class Management
• Index