I struggle with the academic application of Presentation Zen.   Most of my ” presentations” are given to a captive audience that are not necessarily natural listeners.   On those days that I spin a tale and tell a story woven through with the facts of science, I do see a marked increase in attention and interest.  But in reality, this can’t happen every day.  I’ve got some facts to get across.

Our school endorses the Understanding by Design curriculum planning model.  An integral part of the process is crafting enduring understandings and essential questions on which an entire unit is based.  I thought that maybe this would be the place for a Presentation Zen type approach.  Enduring understandings and essential questions are usually big ideas.  A visual introduction to a unit could be quite powerful and engaging.  Revisiting this presentation throughout the unit, to asses student acquisition of the enduring understandings and  essential questions, could also be useful.  Students could add their own images/slides to the presentation and provide the narrative justification to the significance.

Below is what I came up with to introduce our upcoming unit on Density and Buoyancy.  I created this in Powerpoint.  The images are linked to their sources, but I choose to put the creative common usage guidelines in the notes section of the presentation.  I also included the original enduring understandings and essential questions in the notes section.  The second slide is an embedded video from the Let’s Color project.