NOW Classrooms, Grades 9-12. Meg Ormiston

Have students publish and share their podcast. This can include posting the audio to a classroom LMS or using the podcast platform’s tools to make it available online for wider audiences to find and listen to.

       Connections

      You can apply this lesson to different content areas in the following suggested ways.

       TEACHING TIP

      Because of the frenetic activity that often goes on in the classroom, allow students time and space to record their podcast at home or at a location that suits their podcast’s theme.

      • Mathematics: Instruct students to collaborate to create a podcast that explains how to solve an equation in two different real-world settings. Consider organizing students into groups and assigning each group a different topic from a single unit so that, when combined, students’ podcast episodes cover all the topics in the unit.

      • Social science: Have students collaborate to create a weekly podcast on current events. Depending on the class you are teaching, let students select the events that match the course objectives. Encourage them to share their work using social media so they can connect with an authentic audience.

      • Career and technical education: Have students in a digital media course work in groups to organize a podcast about the school’s morning announcements that they can post to the school website to highlight each day’s announcements. Put different student groups in charge of organizing and planning the production each day.

Combining Multimedia Elements to Create Effective Presentations

      The only thing worse than sitting through thirty similar slide presentations is sitting through more than one hundred bad slide presentations, all on the same topic. As students prepare for life after high school, they need to be ready to find information, prepare it, and present their findings in a format that not only demonstrates their understanding but also reaches their intended audience in a way that the audience will best receive and comprehend the information. This means that students need to know how to choose the most appropriate ways to combine and present multiple media forms (such as text, images, audio, and video) and the most efficient form of publishing so their audience can access the published work.

      This NOW lesson set helps students strengthen their presentation skills and put together products that use different forms of media in innovative ways. It starts with creating simple presentations that are focused on delivering information to an audience, then layers in using multiple forms of media while enhancing delivery, and then has students record and share presentations with outside audiences.

      For these lessons, it is essential that you help guide students as they choose presentation topics by breaking down a larger unit of study into subtopics that you assign to students. Each presentation’s content should link directly to students’ assigned topics to avoid long-winded presentations that spend too much time on general, information overviews. A good presentation length at the high school level is between three and five minutes.

       Novice: Creating Simple Presentations

      Learning goal:

      I can demonstrate my understanding of a topic by creating and publishing a text-based slideshow presentation.

      This lesson’s purpose is to help students learn about planning, organizing, creating, and delivering a presentation in front of the class. Some students in high school have created presentations using a slide deck before, but in this lesson the focus is on creating a quality presentation focused on content and data rather than style and flair. Students should know and research their presentation topics before using technology to build their presentations.

      Students will prepare a presentation that demonstrates their knowledge of a topic, focus on incorporating only one form of media into the presentation (text is generally most effective for this), and then publish the presentation.

      Students can choose from multiple tools to build an effective presentation. These include common office productivity apps like PowerPoint (https://products.office.com/en-us/powerpoint), Google Slides (www.google.com/slides/about), and Keynote (www.apple.com/keynote).

       Process: Making a Presentation

      Use the following five steps to help students create a simple, effective presentation.

       TEACHING TIPS

      

To keep the rest of the class engaged during the presentations, create a shared document for student feedback, clarification, and questions and answers. This type of backchanneling takes practice, but it helps develop students’ ability to provide useful feedback.

      

Remember to keep students focused on clear delivery that is specifically tied to the subtopic they worked on.

      1. Have students decide on a presentation topic or assign a different topic to each student. For this lesson, students will create a short, three-to-five-minute presentation with a specific focus on aligning the research and the presentation content to the sub-topic assigned to them.