Notes on PowerPoint and Blogging

I ran across two sites that suggest possible ways to improve using blogs and PowerPoint. 

Getting students to interact with blogs of the other students has been difficult for me.  Furthermore, I have elected not to evaluate the blogs beyond did it or didn’t do it.  However, this blog at Hossack’s House on assessing blogs offers some ideas.  He had his 5th grade students develop rubrics to evaluate blogs.  The rubrics can be found on his site.  They are still in progress.  From reading his blog, I am thinking about having my students read some blogs by other ESL students and develop rubrics based on these blogs.  The rubrics could be used either by me or the students to evaluate their blogs. 

Since I use PowerPoint in all of my classes, I am on the look out for ways to improve interaction because I sometimes look at the glazed look on my students’ faces and know I have not made the class either accessible or interesting.  Karl M. Kapp has a video presentation on using PowerPoint, “PowerPoint: What is Appropriate When and Why?” that offers several suggestions for making presentations more interactive. 

I use PowerPoint for several reasons, but the one I think may be most helpful for some students is that I send them the PowerPoint presentation for future reference.  This way they can pay attention in class and review later.  I have no idea how many review them later though I know some do.  This summer I have been sending out both the PowerPoint version and a pdf version because some students have had problems opening the PowerPoint version. 

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Odds and Ends

Thank you Karen and Nancy for your comments. I have been thinking of my own persona not only as a teacher, but I am now also the program coordinator which has caused some shifting in how I am perceived. Now people are coming to me with different expectations. I don’t feel like I have changed, but I feel a little tug to be seen as more “responsible” at times.

There is an interesting interview on NPR with the MythBusters guys, Adam and Jamie, which I played for my communication class today before they begin a norms violation group project. The point that I took away from it was how these two men with such different personalities form such a good team for the types of experiments they engage in. I often see my students make similar types of adjustments in their groups as they work on group projects.   I rarely structure groups by choosing the students unless I have one language group trying to make the group homogeneous.  Then I intervene.

I am also trying to go a little farther with the video recordings of their presentations. I changed the evaluation instrument and assigned them to evaluate their own presentations which I posted on a webpage. I am trying to build this into the course which I am working on revising for the fall with a new book.

Bud the Teacher wrote:

It’s Funny, Almost Silly

Does it happen to anyone else who’s been blogging for a time that no post makes it through one’s own self-filter, either out of concern for relevancy or job security or just plain fear?
Or is it just me?

I have had that experience so often I don’t think I can count the times.

Teacher’s persona and blogs

Since my  last post, I have been thinking about my persona as a teacher.  I say persona since the person that I present myself in the classroom is not exactly the same person I am outside the classroom.  In the classroom, I am almost extroverted, but outside the classroom I am introverted, having struggled with shyness from my youth and often lost the struggle. 

With this preface in mind, I realize that to successfully build the type of blogging effort I understand to be optimal from what I read about in posts on blogging, I need to change.  It seems that it is important to blog with the students not as an expert nor as a somewhat distant figure.  Instead, it seems that the blogging should be done almost as a peer.  But how can I do that without feeling artificial and being artificial?

I also am not comfortable revealing a great deal about myself online even though I do reveal some of my private self in class.  I sometimes use my own failures as a stepping stone to discussing how I learned something.   For example, I often tell my students that I never really understood fragments until I took a graduate school linguistics class when all of the sudden fragments made sense.  From how they made sense to me, I try to show them how they can make sense of them.  I also use this story to tell them that I don’t expect perfection, but I do expect them to keep trying, and I will keep trying with them and not get tired of explaining because learning frequently doesn’t happen the first or second time we encounter something new or even old.

Still I am more comfortable handling my foibles in a classroom thanking my students for setting me straight than I am doing the same in a blog.  So I am still not sure what persona I should take on when blogging with my class.

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