Thing 9

I am not a big fan of Power Point presentations as I feel they are often boring and a substitute for authentic engagement with students. However, I do understand the need for them when connecting with someone who cannot be in the classroom. I do think my students are way ahead of me on this kind of thing, and I would depend on them to help me produce something that would be effective and informative. I am not clear on the differences between Slidecasts and the project I have been working on with my Jing. The students are very savvy and up to date on how to do power points, adding all sorts of jazzy features. Since I don't use them in my class, I am not as good with them. I can see how they might be very useful for factual information, certainly.

I do think that slidecasts are not entirely compatible with my style of teaching in which I open the class with the question, "What do you think?" about something we read the night before. I expect the discussion to go in a slightly different direction in each class depending on what caught the students' attention. Slidecasts may be a bit too teacher-centric for my style which depends on a give and take style of engagement with the material.

Of course, for something such as citation style, having a slidecast may be invaluable. I will see what I can put together.

OOps---just thought of something else for this project--a slideshow about the history of the novel--that would be great to have available on the library website or on mine to inform students about how the novel as evolved since Samuel Richardson's Pamela!

Also Mac's new suite of office software is supposed to have some fabulous new features, so I may become a stauncher fan of powerpoints in the future (or of Mac's version, Keynote!)