Teaching large classes / PowerPoint Presentations

Presentations

To tell the truth I was not a real fan of PP Presentations. Do you ask why? Well, so far I had some possibilities to see PP Presentations done without any interactive tools and I got bored watching them and listening to the presenter. However, this week has changed my relationship towards presentations. New ideas of how to use presentations, tips and tricks, interactive games and quizzes have shown me new ways of how to use presentations. Quizzes and interactive language games are my plans for the future. I have already created a presentation and presented it to my students. I think all the articles with tips and helpful ideas which were presented this week like Garr Reynolds Presentation and Make Use of Powerpoint are useful websites which helped me to prepare my slides.

Thank you colleagues for mentioning Prezi, Sliderocket or Zoho . They all seem to be useful for me and my students because on our school's computers we do not have Microsoft Office software installed and they might be a solution of how to present.

Teaching large classes

This week was also about using technology tools in large classes. Because I am a high school teacher I do not get a chance to teach more than 25 students. I know it is also hard to get smaller class engaged in listening, reacting and working on what teacher tells but teaching a class of 40 teenagers and more that is a real challenge some teachers have to face. I can tell I am the lucky one but also would like to use tech tools like Moodle, Blackboard and the one we have at school. Because I have used our school's e-learning version for testing students' knowledge and skills I know how to create a simple test but this week I have learned more about how to create a good quiz question and learned about pros and cons of using online assessment tools. At the beginning I kind of liked our school's e-learning tool but soon found out that I cannot upload audio files to test listening comprehension and also the amount of questions was limited.

This week I have enjoyed quite a lot even though there was a lot of reading but quality of the articles was very high. The articles about how to get students engaged were inspiring. I will use the ideas mentioned there to get my students motivated for class. Article about Just in Time Teaching inspired me and I see it as a new way of how to present homework or self study to students. Despite it was originally developed for use in physics education I see some possibilities in teaching English when doing some conversation to certain topic. This way students prepare for the next lesson review the previous one and do some research which they would not do.