Week Four: PowerPoint Presentations

          Well this week we have been talking about power point presentations. I am not currently a teacher but when I become one I would like to give a  presentation on the safety of wearing your seat belt in the car. Students know that it's the law but they don't know why. So I would like to show them the important factors that come with wearing a seat belt and what it can do if you don't wear it. I had to create this power point when I was studying in my undergrad on safety so I could use the same PowerPoint however, I would just have to change a few things in the presentation. Something I would change would be the graphics of the presentation. There are some graphic pictures that wouldn't be appropriate for students to view. So I would take them out and replace them with pictures that were acceptable. Also I would hope that students would respond in a positive way, after learning why it is important to be safe is important and once they know that I hope they would act accordingly.
      Some other things that we talked about this week was TED. TED is a source of presentation given by people on topics ranging on a wide perspective. The topic I chose was "gaming to re- engaging boys in learning" given by a lady named Ali Carr-Chellman. She talks about how boys are culturally different than girls in the classroom. They enjoy games and sports and the classroom isn't based around that. She goes into statistics and reasons why boys need to be involved and we should do that by generating video games to capture their attention. If you haven't seen it you should watch it.  http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html
     Other topics we covered in our tech explorations were Story bird which was an amazing site where you could create your own virtual story. An excellent source for children who want to share their creativity.         
    Another exploration we did was Ispeech where you can take text and have someone verbalize it for you. This site also has a mobile app that will read your text message and emails on your phone out loud while your driving so you can drive safely.
     We also looked at the website where you can create comics by taking photos and text and with a click of a button you have a comic. I personally thought this source was excellent a fun looking for all ages. Especially for boys, because boys always love comics it is something that can catch their attention and keep their interest in the classroom during the lesson. http://plasq.com/education/
 So overall I would say this week has been successful in learning the different aspects of PowerPoint presentation in what to do and what not to do, and all the other explorations from this week.