What we MUST consider when including... Presentations in the classroom.

Hello everyone!

This time I want to introduce a useful way to deal with a topic in the classroom. I will talk about including Presentations in the lesson and what we must take into consideration when using tools to present a new topic or ask our students to create presentations to share what they have learnt. Before I start, I will show you pictures of two of the tools we use to present nowadays: POWER POINT and PREZI.

                            

The first thing you need to analyse is the topic or theme you have to teach or ask your students to present, considering linguistic contents like grammar and vocabulary and what aspects of the topic per se would you like to show them or your aims for this project. For example, when planning ECO II presentations, my mates and I chose to talk about CINEMA and helped students to create a PREZI presentation about their favourite movie or actor/actress. The presentation included a mini-biography of the actor/actress and sentences about why they chose this actor or movie. As our main aim, we expected students to talk about their favourite actor/actress and their favourite movies. As contents, we had to teach past simple with regular and irregular verbs and adjectives; and we needed to include vocabulary related to films and adjectives to describe movies. Once we analysed all the content we chose to introduce the topic using a PREZI presentation, showing some details of a new movie 'MALEFICENT'.  

Click to see PREZI of Maleficent.     

Then, if you are introducing a new topic, you need to make your presentation appealing to students' interests, and you can also include something about you in the presentation. For example, for ECO II presentations, some mates decided to record their own materials or share their likes/dislikes/routines and photos; it creates a positive reaction from students and they can be encouraged to tell you something about them. Also, it is better to work with authentic contexts and authentic materials, encouraging students to think about the target language by focusing on cultural components or think about their own culture. 

You also need to take into account ways of providing support to students, by showing them a video about how to use a resource, presenting guiding questions, monitoring, suggest websites, etc. 

Finally, some considerations that you MUST NOT forget are... 

How the use of technology will help or affect your presentation? You definitely need to consider what each application will allow you to do, and analyse the resources you will use in a deep way. You can choose to use different applications, but they may not correspond with what you need to teach and in the end, your students switch off because they are not appealing enough. 

Consider the time each activity takes and the time of your presentation, also take into account the level of the students to design your presentation. Or if your students are the presenters, the presentations should not last more than 10 minutes considering the amount of people. 

And as I said before, KEEP YOUR AUDIENCE INTERESTED! 

That is the most important aim! 

Thank you very much and comments are welcome. 

Bye!