Powerpoint Help

I know many of us have had to sit through painful powerpoint presentations, delivered both my adults and by students. The ones where someone just reads the slides to the audience....you know what I mean.

Mr. Byrne at free technology for teachers refers to a great website on his blog. Slidemagnet.com gives suggestions on how to do better presentations. I found the Deck of the Day to be a helpful slide presentation on how to create effective slide presentations. I would certainly share ideas from this site with my students before a powerpoint project. It's also tempting to send this to some "higher ups" that I've seen present...but that might not go over to well :)

Thing 10: Digital Storytelling

Shawn's post inspired me to look at Thing 10! Shows the power of an RSS feed and reading other people's blogs!

I would say that history day is a time when many of my students engage in digital storytelling. The documentaries that they create show in-depth analysis of their topic. I've always wanted to assign a documentary project at the beginning of the year so that ALL kids are exposed to this medium. However, it is way beyond my comfort zone and so I have not yet taken the plunge. I know that my wonderful media specialist and my tech coordinator would be willing to help. I just haven't taken that step yet.

I thought that a couple of the sites mentioned in the directions for thing 10 sounded very promising. Awesomestories.com is a really interesting site for primary documents. They have different categories of stories including biographies, disasters, and history. I took a brief look at the story of Joan of Arc. These digital stories includes primary sources, so when it says that "Joan of Arc was put on trial" a person can click on "trial" and read the court transcripts. I put a tag on this site in my delicious account. Very promising for a history teacher!

I also could see myself using ourstory.com in the future. I would love for each of my advisees to create a story about themselves in the form of a timeline. they could include what they have already experienced as well as what they hope for the future in regards to their education and career. This will be a nice compliment to the new advisory curriculum that we will have next year. These timelines would be a great thing to share at student-led conferences.

Helpful History Website

Today I was looking at some websites during conferences. I came across the landmark project and discovered they had some good resources for History. I was reminded of the power of the British Museum and I also discovered a great source of biographies. I wish I had remembered these sources for History Day!

The landmark website is nice because it has selected websites with descriptions and suggested uses in the classroom.

Some of the sites were dead links, but overall I thought it was a good site. It went beyond History, but I just focused on that part.