I've been using PowerPoint for a while now. But mostly for very basic lectures - no moving parts, no animations, just text and informative pictures and diagrams. In the middle of the Fall semester, I'd begun to utilize Mac's comparable Keynote program as the medium for my Daily Schedule and Learning Log (a daily question they do at the beginning of class). I used a background format begun by my mentor teacher, so it looked pretty good (except for one ridiculous spelling error on the title slide).
I went to using PowerPoint for the Daily at the beginning of this Spring semester, incorporating a couple of lab and in-class assignment instructions as part of the powerpoint, sequenced so that I could click to the next slide when it was time for those instructions. However, I abandoned that daily about 80% of the way through the unit. I was frustrated by my lack of facility with PowerPoint on Mac. My formatting skills were decidedly lackluster. I never felt like I had enough space to write what I needed to. The Daily was just in the way, sitting on the screen at the beginning of each period for the sole purpose of preventing me from taking roll online or setting up later parts of the lesson like online clips, movies, diagrams, and podcasts.
So I decided to change that. My objectives?
Besides improving my formatting skills, I wanted to learn how to embed media and hyperlinks into my PowerPoints so that I wouldn't have to worry about closing down the daily to transition to the digital media portions of the day's lessons. More than that, I wanted to explore the usefulness of powerpoint as a unit organization
So here it is, my beautiful DNA Daily, in slightly less than perfect form. The Objectives on Slide 2 are the overarching objectives for the whole five-week DNA unit, conceived in the tradition of Understanding by Design/Backwards Design. Those objective are referenced at the top of each of the following slides, telling me which objectives I was covering each day (the labels look hideous on slideshare, less so when the show is played in its original form in my classroom). The Essential Questions are also UbD/BD inspired. We discussed them at the beginning of the unit and then at the end to assess how the students' changing thoughts about DNA form and function. In my classroom, the hyperlinks on slides 7, 9, and 12 each link to the videos on the following slides, which start automatically as soon as they come up. The hyperlink on slide 19 web-linked me to a video to be found here, and was my highest hope for transferability to slideshare. Alas, I can not even click on the hyperlink on slideshare, much less get it to work.
Slideshare really should have been a part of my IEP.
On a more positive note, I can send you a much nicer version of the powerpoint as an e-mail attachment on request any time after Mother's Day, Sunday May 9, 2010 (when I can get back to my computer and access
In the end, this was an extremely valuable learning experience for me as a teacher. I was extremely satisfied with my finished product; it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It made my life easier instead of harder. Transitions to digital media were smooth, something I'd never experienced before, and now I have a compact unit recorded for posterity. It is extremely disappointing that I did not think ahead enough to spend more time on the "publishing" aspect of this assignment, but it in no way diminishes my profound relief that I now have a quick and easy method of keeping my digital media choices at my fingertips.
Early Spring 2010
Cell parts daily
View more presentations from Erin Gilland.
Late Spring 2010
DNA Daily
View more presentations from Erin Gilland.
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