Ever wondered how to keep students occupied? Or have you felt helpless even as your carefully prepared lessons disintegrated before your eyes as students were bored with the Power Point Presentation or ‘Black Line Masters’ that you had created? Ever looked at those teachers, who seem technically rooted, and felt jealous seeing their movie clips and interactive presentations?
If the answer to any of the above is ‘yes’, then it’s time to learn how to improve your presentation skills. We live in a world where every thing from food to even recreation is fast. People have no time for following the ‘tortoise style’ of doing things. Aesop’s fable of ‘slow and steady wins the race’ no longer applies since you and I will be left far behind.
There are tonnes of ways by which you can improve your presentation skills. The important thing to remember is, “why are you creating the material that you are working on?” Are you attempting to impress your students? Are you looking for a promotion? Or are you creating media-savvy learning material so that students are challenged and occupied?
I hope that you answered ‘yes’ to the last question because then you are on the right track to becoming an excellent educator like Jaime Escalante or Sir Ken Robinson. The important thing to remember while creating material is that it has to educate and generate interest amongst students. Immediately, students should want to research on the topic of learning further.
Learning material can be made interesting and one of them is to create movies or video clips. There's a range of software available to teachers nowadays. But as a teacher, it is imperative that the content is appropriate for the age group it is targeted at. Some of the websites that provide movie-creation services are:
-www.digitalfilms.com
-www.dfilm.com (now known as dvolver)
-www.toondoo.com
-www.abc.net/rollercoaster/rollermache
-www.xtranormal.com
All these websites are user-friendly. They require a valid e-mail ID and password so as to log onto the website. Once in, you can follow the instructions and create your own story board. You can add characters, speech bubbles, costumes, back drops, music, change camera angles and even move the characters around.
I used ‘www.digitalfilms.com’ to create a story on ‘Cyber Bullying’ and 'www.xtranormal.com’ to create a mock-interview between David Letterman and myself. I did use ‘www.dfilm.com’ to create an animated video clip on relationships.
There are certain issues that will crop up when using these websites and they are as follows:
-Inappropriate advertisements and animation characters
-Body image issues amongst students on seeing the characters in the videos or movies
-Not all age groups are interested in animation clips
-Chunky movements in certain websites that result in the animation looking antique
-Not many backdrops or features. This will result in stereotyped video clips
These websites make it easier to create content that students will be interested in. But, remember not all of the characters or advertisments in the websites are appropriate for students. Some of the advertisements as well as the content are adult-rated and cannot be viewed by school students. Indeed, I found some of the characters could result in ‘body image’ issues amongst students.
As stated, some of the animation seem out-dated like the huge servers that would fill entire floors in the 1970’s. Also, I found the lack of variety in features resulted in some of my presentations looking no different from the ones created earlier. So students felt that they were looking at the same thing over and over again.
Though I seem to be placing a spoke in the wheel of creativity, I still would like to say that such websites are very useful to create content that students would find interesting. I found that investing in Windows Live Movie Maker not only made it easier to create content for my classes but also made them look more professional.
If you are seriously contemplating a career in teaching, then I would suggest that you invest in software and hardware that will enable you to improve your mode and style of delivery of content. You will notice a marked improvement in your students’ standards of learning.
