Ignite the Doodle Revolution

This puts two of 21st century presentations most powerful tools together.  Ignite presentations and active Visual thinking.  If we could only talk Sunni Brown into writing a book for students.

Dan Roam on the History of Visual Thinking

Understanding visual thinking is important to good presentation design. Dan Roam has been championing this cause for the last several years and constructs brilliant presentations that utilize and explain why visual thinking is so fundamental to restructuring they way we teach students to present.  Visual thinking is the basis of recoded information from ancient cave paintings through hieroglyphs and written language. Visual communication and thinking in the classroom is a simple and basic tool for problem solving and cognitive thinking.



SXSW 2010: Dan Roam on Visual Thinking from Teehan+Lax on Vimeo.

Conference Notes Part 1

21st Century education cannot be accomplished by adding computers to teaching.  Classrooms filled to the breakers with IWBs, clickers and computer stations does not electro-magically become 21st century trough addition.  Students may leave secondary education with the requisite knowledge from State mandated testing, but learning leaders everywhere admit that mandatory testing is part of the industrial age of education when 80% of students were trained for factory or agricultural work.  Education needs a transformative experience that addresses three aspects of the classroom environment: 

1.The methods through which students are provided information from learning leaders.

2. The manipulation of the information, and problem solving conducted by students.

3. The presentation of student results and findings

Good presentation design begins with modeling techniques for students.  Learning leaders are teaching more than just the content of their course whenever they present to the class. The presentation style itself is a learning moment.  To often, the complaints coming from classrooms involve students poor performance through presentation, but when I look at the presentation methods of the instructor they are similar to those of the students.  If you present anything with mindless bullet points or overly complex graphics students will return the information to you in a nearly identical manner.  If the instructor reads pages upon pages of outlines from the IWB then student will present the same way.  The following slides come from my student guide to presentations.  Do not read them as rules.  This format is designed to create presentations based upon Duarte Design's and Guy Kawasaki's basic framework. If students are going to be competitive in whatever they choose to do in life they need basic tools to grow.  Their are as many ways to present as their are learning styles.  The object of 21st Century Presentation is to create engagement that makes the audience want to learn more and use the information provided.

How to present

View more presentations from historyman8.

Prezi is a great visual presentation method that enables presenters to reach outside of the constraints of PowerPoint.  Like any technique it can be over used.  Learning leaders should create a personal brand, flipping back and forth through presentation styles haphazardly is confusing to your learning team.  Prezi, PowerPoint and the software that came with you IWB are just a small set of tools.  Don't forget that anytime a learning leader is distributing information to a class he, or she, is presenting. Documents, textbooks, webpages, wikis, and blogs are all presentation media. Simply using them is not enough to be 21st century.  The how and the why are the key.

Copy of Thoughts on using Prezi as a teaching tool on Prezi

Empressr

Empressr is a nice presentation tool that can be used either to create a presentation or modify an existing PowerPoint.  One of its best attributes is the embedding code that allows you to post presentations to you blog or wiki.

Use your cellphone to create presentation backgrounds

This summer I spent some time tearing down an old garage

Most of us have cell phones of on type or another (or various ipods) with cameras. If you have ever been somewhere and saw an image that you wish you could share with your class, but forgot your camera? Psst...Its in your pocket. Most camera phones carry at least a 2 mega-pixel digital camera which is perfect for creating presentation backgrounds and images. It not difficult at all.

First after you take the picture enter your email address into your phone's contact list. Then send the image as a picture message to you email.

Next download the picture edit with any photo software and then insert it into your preferred presentation platform.

Its that simple. And you get custom images to use for presentations.

Taken with my LG Chocolate 3  2mega-pixel camera with no editing.

Have you ever wanted to do a project with your students using local digital photography.  Psst...Their cameras are in their pockets.























Below is a great set of dimple ideas to improve your cellphone photography skills.