"Covering" MacBeth

Years ago I came across this assignment asking students to examine Lolita's book covers through time, from the early 50s through today. But we certainly aren't reading Lolita in high school. I stored this away as an interesting activity and today while perusing my bookmarks I cam across it again. I immediately thought of doing this same assignment with MacBeth, the next book 9th graders at my school are going to study.

So I googled MacBeth book covers and came across a wide assortment and thought of sharing this idea with the English teachers with whom I work.

Using Keeler's Drive Slides, I made a little slide deck showing a dozen out of hundreds of MacBeth covers.

One of these images took me to this fantastic lesson  which asked students to design their own covers. Brilliant. A natural next step. Kudos to teacher Sarah Small.

Interactive Google Slides

Stand and deliver presentations remain a primary/ the primary way teachers transmit information. Many teachers use PowerPoint, Google Slides and other slidedeck tools to support these lectures and presentations. A little bit of know how with Google Slides will let a presenter make a more dynamic/ interactive presentation.

Here are 5 of my main tips:
1) Backchannel. Use the Peardeck add on or the Presenter View to allow quieter students to ask questions and more fully participate in the class. I was speaking with one of my students today about a report a teacher wrote saying she wished this student spoke more. I teach at a place which prides itself on its kindness. Many students share their opinions freely. Teachers pride themselves for fostering dynamic conversation in their classroom. Yet this girl just doesn't feel comfortable speaking in that class.

2) Formative Assessment- See above. After all, how do we know what students are thinking and knowing. Peardeck and Presenter View are both terrific for this as well.

3) Don't clutter slides with words. Slidedecks should support the presentation, not be the presentation. Pictures, large graphics and keywords should comprise the bulk of the visual presentation. Bullet points upon bullet points of information is a recipe for boring and does little to supplement or enhance the presentation.

4) DriveSlides by Alice Keeler is a great new(ish) extension by Alice Keeler that I use to share student work back with kids. I use DriveSlides in conjunction with Google Classroom. Remember that Google Classroom creates a Classroom folder in Drive. Now imagine you have students share screenshots of their artwork. math homework, etc... A sub-folder containing this work will exist in Drive. A quick click of the DriveSlides extension will make a Slides presentation with its own url. It's a super easy way to receive and share out student work.

5) Google Keep/ Slides Integration: Archive pictures with Google Keep. Using the Keep Notepad in the Tools menu, you can easily pull in these pictures and other work.

Free Presentation Tools Post #2. Magisto

Magisto lets one make short (or longer with pro and premium versions) of videos and pictures. It is a quick and easy tool to use with real professional looking results. Below are some highlights of a trip to Ireland 9 years ago. It looks pretty good. And my goodness, my kids have grown. 

Using Slides to Create a Presentation

My students are studying the rather archaic and difficult to understand Ancient Chinese Philosophies. To make them more accessible, I asked them to find movie lines and song lyrics that best capture the philosophies on Confucius, the Legalists and the Taoists. I feel that being able to put find connections across centuries and being able to put these philosophies into contemporary language helps make meaning. Take a look. I thought it well done.

Transformations

SAMR Model

   Transformations don't have to be big things. This chart shows Puentedura's already famous SAMR model. It is a helpful model when thinking about change. A tech newbie teacher at my school came to see me about an intro activity for the start of school. She wants to learn names quickly. Unfortunately, pictures of new kids don't show up for several weeks in our online grade books. Last year, she created a google doc but passed her iPad around and kids took turns creating posting their pictures on successive pages on the same google doc via the same machine. With only a little tweak- we created a slides presentation for this year. She created a page for each child. Using their camera, kids posted a selfie and wrote an introduction of themselves on their assigned pages.
   Yesterday, I showed her how to make a QR code of the finished presentation to hang in her classroom- making the presentation immediately accessible to parents and more importantly other students.
    We are getting into redefinition territory. More importantly, the teacher reports the kids really liked the activity. She had the germ of a good idea last year but didn't know what to do with it or how to implement it. What we did really isn't great shakes. It isn't profound stuff. Still, at a certain level, the tech was a game changer here. She had a good lesson, it was effectively implemented, the kids liked it. The technology allowed her to change the lesson to make it more interactive, quicker, easier, and useful. We reached the level of modification and approached redefinition with the QR code.