Presentation Peace

by Evgeni Dinev

Everyone who knows me well knows that I have a fear of presenting. It isn’t just your typical fear either. It is the kind of fear that keeps you from eating for days, makes you feel queasy and has you even speculate hypnosis as a possible cure for it. However, there are times when I must present such as Parent Night, SUNY course projects and an in-house institute at school.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I volunteered to present this year at our in-house institute. I guess I thought that I should share back what I learned from the Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project summer institutes I attended.

I had wanted to try the presentation-style Pecha Kucha, which my professor Jeff Utecht had shown in class. However, it didn’t quite fit the “workshop” style of my presentation. I planned to have participants stop and try things along the way. However, I liked the use of strong visuals with little text for digital storytelling. With this in mind, I set out to create a PowerPoint with visuals that would make strong connections for the viewer and tie into the theme of my presentation.

I titled my presentation “Expedition in Nonfiction” because it is our class name for reading workshop on every day ten when we stop and focus on nonfiction. This idea was inspired by a Choice Literacy workshop called “Nonfiction Snapshots” presented last summer by Andrea Smith. I was able to use a variety of outdoor scenes for my presentation using photos from FreeDigitalPhotos. I had only captions on most slides, unless it was a chart. With the help of Nancy Gorneau, our technology teacher for grades 3 to 5, I was able to add gradients of color to help show a progression for the charts and use colors that connected the charts to the previous images too.

by Filomena Scalise

As I created my PowerPoint, I considered questions from “Visual Literacy and the Classroom” by Erin Riesland, such as “What are some visual/verbal relationships I can use?” For finding the main idea of a text, I used a forest because it is a lot like “Seeing the forest from the trees.” I added an open hand with the title “Get a Hand-le On It” for using the hand as an organizer for finding main ideas.

I ended the presentation with a slide titled “A Backpack of Ideas” to connect it to the expedition theme. On this slide

by Phiseksit

I added some creative ways to link nonfiction to other reading units, such as current events with Flocabulary’s “The Week in Rap,” which I think is more appropriate for high school students, but it gives us ideas for putting news to verse. I also showed  History Pin as an idea for the use of digital cameras to take photos of landmarks, and then add research paragraphs to create our own history pin-ish page. I plan to start next year’s nonfiction expedition with wonderings about the images at Wonderopolis to show how exciting nonfiction really is.

In the end, I think this was my best presentation yet because the images were powerful. I even felt a little less nervous to deliver it. Just a little!