As I began my position as Director of Technology at my school I soon realized that one thing I needed to work on was how to give presentations. As a teacher I never thought about how I would deliver a lesson because for the most part I felt I had that down and when I didn't I could improvise, but in my new position I soon realize I was losing my audience when I presented. In order to improve this I have begun to look for resources on how to present and what an effective presentation look like. The interesting part is that my issues with presenting are the same issues I have seen with my students when presenting to the class. Recently, because of the book Why School? by Richardson I decided to provide my students with the opportunity to create their Personal Project where they chose to teach us whatever they wanted, while also grading themselves based on their own ideas of what a good presentation should look like. Unfortunately what I found is that I hadn't prepared my students to provide effective presentations just like I had not been taught how to provide effective presentations myself. For this reason I looked up in TED Talks how to present effective presentations and found this great video by Nancy Duarte entitled "The Secret Structure of Great Talks" (2010).
In her presentation Nancy mentions that an idea is the most powerful thing a human being can have and that many ideas are not adopted, even if your idea is better than another ideas, because we aren't able to communicate our idea effectively. While watching this video I soon realize that my students have great ideas and that just like me they can teach the world many things but that unfortunately I have not been the effective teacher I need to be, to properly allow them to communicate their ideas. Duarte (2010) mentions that the presenter is the mentor of a story while the audience is the protagonist, which makes a lot of sense because as teachers we are the mentors in the classroom, so it is parallel to being a presenter at a presentation. Duarte goes on to diagram how a presentation should look and how we need to go back and forth between what should be and what it is and that just like a sailboat we need to go back and forth between resistance and what could be. Now you might ask how this all relates to technology and leadership, well for the leadership part it is pretty straight forward, if I want to make a difference I need to have my staff buy into what I want them to do, not just tell them they have to do it, which has been my tactic in the past. On the technology side, we as leaders in this field know that resistance by teachers, specially older teachers is a given, after seeing this presentation I realize that I need to use the resistance that we confront in order to lead our teachers to where we want them to. In my case that would be using more technology in the classroom and giving students more options. Reference Duarte, Nancy. "TEDxEast - Nancy Duarte Uncovers Common Structure of Greatest Communicators 11/11/2010." YouTube. YouTube, 11 Nov. 2010. Web. 11 June 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nYFpuc2Umk>. Richardson, W. (2012). Why school how education must change when learning and information are everywhere / Will Richardson. New York, NY: TED Conferences.
1 Comment
6/12/2015 07:29:34 pm
Thanks for posting this video on your blog - so informative and inspirational! Cohort 2 member
Reply
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm Mr. D and I have been teaching technology for a better part of 12 years. Welcome to my blog! ArchivesCategories |