Earnest - Week Four Blog

This week we focused on presentation software. I found an old PowerPoint® that I had prepared for a class several years ago and looking at it now, I am shocked. It looks so immature and definitely is at the novice level! Although, I must say, it did serve its purpose at the time.

Since I do not currently teach in a classroom, for this week’s lesson I developed a presentation for our new live@edu e-mail system. This is a system that will be utilized not only by staff but also by students so I felt it was an appropriate presentation to prepare, especially since I will be training different groups of people on this new system as part of my job this year. Here are my answers to the questions we were assigned this week:

What was the presentation about and to whom did you present it?
My presentation was about the new live@edu e-mail system. I have yet to present it to a full audience but did send it to my Director of Technology for review. She has two school-age daughters, so I suppose you could say I presented it to three people so far.

Of which item in your presentation are you the most proud?
I like the fact that I utilized the Notes portion of the software this time. I had never done that, but felt like by the time I actually presented this training to an audience, I would have forgotten the specific items I wanted to mention. So I decided to use the notes so they would trigger me as to what I had in mind when I created the presentation.

What might you do differently if you could create the presentation again?
I would take the time to add some creative elements, such as adding arrows that would appear to point out certain portions of the presentation. I have one slide where I emphasize the four different choices a user has for the Instant Messaging portion. Even though I have screenshots of the actual differences, it would be nice to add some kind of arrow or circle effect as I ask the audience the questions associated with those different choices.

How did your students respond to the presentation?
Since I have not utilized this as a full presentation as yet to staff or students, I can only report that my Director of Technology was pleased with what I had produced and it did make sense to her and her daughters. I try to make my presentations straightforward so that a person could actually go back and use the training presentation as a guide or refresher if needed. Overall, I was pleased with the limited response that I received and I’m looking forward to using it with staff and students in the future.

I appreciate the fact I could create something for this class that I can actually use in my current position with our school district. I will definitely be tweaking it over the next few weeks in order to be ready to use it when school starts in three weeks. It won’t be long now!