Online “Back to School Night” Presentation.

As a parent, I’ve been to a few “back to school nights”. This year was typical where we followed our child’s schedule from room to room and had a 7 minute presentation by each of his teachers.  I’ve heard teachers say they try to pack the time with their presentation to cut to a minimum questions by parents, because these frequently turn into child specific questions more suited to a one-on-one discussion.

Generally, the teachers introduce themselves, try to convey how much they care about your child’s success in their class and gives some information about what the class entails and how to stay in contact. For this weeks assignment we were to include something about technology in the classroom. One of my questions included whether to treat this as a real back to school presentation or concentrate on the technology aspect? Some of our class made the presentation totally about technology, some included it in a general presentation. From my perspective it seemed to make sense to include some info about the class, but to concentrate on explaining how and why technology would be used in the my class. I do think parents today would appreciate this information. 

I do like the idea of uploading these kinds of presentations so that they can be viewed or re-viewed by parents and students. Of course, the fact that they will be available on-line increases the importance of expressing yourself clearly and being sure that School, District and State standards are accurately presented. This is not the place for making comments or promises that will come back to haunt you! 

I also found the idea of using Google Docs for my presentation appealing— at least at first. I found formatting to be frustrating, as some changes seems to happen- or not happen- randomly. I’m not sure that I won’t go back to using either PowerPoint or Keynote.

One concern I have is uploading a complete presentation and not just the slides. Any good PowerPoint type presentation should have just the key points bulleted. If all the information is on the slides why not just do a written document? There is an implied performance to the presentation— which is generally spoken. I know we will be recording a presentation to go along with our slides. I am concerned with how much practice I will need to record something that doesn’t make me sound stupid and/or confusing. My concern is not so much about this one assignment, as how realistic it is to do this on a regular basis as a teacher?

My son’s chemistry teacher puts her PowerPoint presentation on her website. She has told her students not to copy down the presentation in class, but to view it as homework and make notes and copy graphs, etc. from it then. I think my son has found this helpful, but it is just her presentation. It is assumed that the student has already seen the class lecture and is using the slides to help remember what was covered. Trying to record a complete lecture every day seems like a tremendous amount of work. Is that what is expected in the 21^st century classroom? 

I inevitably find it harder to create the content than to do the technology. Coming up with the content for this assignment was no exception. I hope some of the work that is unrelated to learning the technology will be adaptable for later “real life” presentations.