PowerPoint
Practice
Presentations
are becoming more and more common in the classroom. Even if students
do not have the skills (and hard- and software) they need to prepare
a presentation, they can be given the opportunity to practice
giving presentations. All you need are some PowerPoint presentations.
These can be found by the thousands on the web.
How can you
use them in the classroom?
Step 1: Just
choose a topic that is relevant from the point of view of the
curriculum and try to find a suitable PowerPoint presentation.
Use, for example, the query filetype:ppt great-barrier-reef
with Google to find one on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Step 2: If
you have a computer and a video projector available in the classroom,
project the whole presentation or parts of it.
Step 3: Ask
students to carefully look at a sequence of 3-5 slides.
Step 4: Ask
a student to come forward and present the slides as if they were
his/her own presentation. This will give students some experience
of how to present such slides and - after discussion - what mistakes
to avoid, the most frequent one being looking over one's shoulder
at the slide rather than at the audience. .
Optional step
5: You could present some presentations on the same topic and
discuss their respective merits. Point out, that slides are not
necessarily perfect. Spelling mistakes can be found frequently.
Optional step
6: Students who have computers and Internet access at home can
be given the URL of a good PowerPoint presentation. Their homework
task would then be to find the information they need to give the
presentation in an expert way. Ideal are presntations that work
with keywords rather than complete sentences.
A presentation
on reefs: Coral
Reefs
