A Math teacher... teaching?

You can't miss the opportunity of watching this YouTube video in which a Math teacher does something quite unique. 

If you want to catch your students’ attention for a couple of minutes (maybe you want to wake them up in a Monday morning) this is a highly effective way to do it.

I won’t tell you what it’s all about because you have to watch it and see it for yourself.

Enough. Just ‘push to play’. ;)

An "alive" Pecha Kucha

We spoke all throughout the year about the ‘Pecha Kucha’ presentations (how to pronounce it? HERE) and we had the chance of trying them in front of the Practical Issues audience.

We all know now that a Pecha Kucha presentation has its particular way of presenting a topic: you have to do it while showing 20 slides and each of the slides has to be on display just for 20 seconds. That gives you a total presentation time of 6 minutes, 40 seconds.

Marilí (http://marilimaldonado.blogspot.com.ar), our Phonetics teacher, gave us the opportunity to present a Pecha Kucha there, in Centro de Idiomas, for Practical Issues. Many of us couldn’t do it live because there wasn’t enough time to prepare it. Luckily, I was part of the group who could do it.

My classmates Fernanda (http://icttherewego.blogspot.com/) and Aldana (http://aldanamviano.blogspot.com/) - and I - worked on one of the possible topics that Marilí provided us: “How to make sounds memorable”.  We had to propose a set of guidelines that could be useful for teachers when they have to show their students how to produce certain sounds. Moreover, we tried to give tips on how to make students remember the way these sounds are produced. 

The experience was great. Apart from the feeling that we were contributing to English teaching, we also felt, in a way, loved. We received displays of affection from everybody there. People we didn’t know were encouraging us and saying very nice things to us, as if our work was good! We knew it was a 'special edition' of the Practical Issues because there was going to be a tribute to Daniel Fernández and María Isabel Recamán. In addition, our teacher, Marilí, is about to retire so we tried our best to make her proud of her students. And she said she was!

 

We ended up really tired (I got ill!) but, in all, it was a wonderful Saturday. Plus, we enjoyed our teachers’ presentations, which were excellent! They gave us lots of ideas as regards technology in the classroom and they even showed some of our blogs and the work we are doing in ECO2.

Now we ‘are supposed to’ design another Pecha Kucha presentation for ECO2. I hope that previous experience helps us to do it a little bit faster than before!

Anyway, if there is someone out there that would be interested in presenting the topic “How to make sounds memorable”, he/she can download the presentation –in Power Point – and the script. Just click HERE and good luck!

Power Point vs. Prezi

We were asked to watch a couple of videos about these two presentation generators and to make a comparison.

I'm posting here one of them because it is hilarious. It is about what NOT to do with a Power Point Presentation.

The thing is, you CAN use some of these features exaggeratedly if you want to make a point, specially if you use humour in your presentation. If we are talking about a formal presentation, in which you speak about a delicate subject, maybe it would be better if you follow Don McMillan advices.

Prezi, in contrast, has two significant advantages: you have endless space to work on (your work will not be reduced to a single slide) and you can make use of the zoom for highlighting information (for example: a part of a picture). Besides, you don't have to worry about the version of Microsoft Office that your learners may have in their netbooks because Prezi needs only a web browser and the Flash component installed (it's hard to find a computer without these two requirements). Not to mention that the animation Prezi offers is much more appealing.

Here you can learn about a couple of Prezi features.

Hope you like it.
See you around!