While I was at the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference yesterday, I had a chance to see a presentation given by a wonderful teacher. John Fladd is an eighth-grade social studies teacher at the Deerfield Community School, in Deerfield, NH.   He gave a talk called “Inspiring PowerPoints – NOT an Oxymoron,”  during which he showed us a large variety of PowerPoint presentations which he uses with his students. These presentations all use sound, video  and many many wonderful images to bring to life the topics that he teaches, and to do it with a theatrical flair and a great sense of humor.

On his blog, Teacher Toys, John has created a page with quite a number of links and resources that he uses in creating presentations.   If you use PowerPoint with any regularity, take a look at his page, I suspect that you’ll find quite a number of useful things. It’s at http://teachertoys.weebly.com/nelms.html.

John opened his presentation with a YouTube video by comedian Don McMillan which does an amazingly good, and amazingly funny job of demonstrating the problems of so many PowerPoint presentations. Watch it now, just make sure you’re not drinking anything you could spit out all over your keyboard when you break out laughing.

When I googled to find Don’s website, I discovered that he has a brand-new version of his Life After Death By PowerPoint video which you can watch on his site. I actually think I like the original version a little bit better, but there is some great new bits in the new version. Check it out at http://www.technicallyfunny.com/blog/blogdon.htm

I just got back from making two presentations at the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Nashua, NH. I really enjoyed presenting both longer and shorter versions of the talk I call “Once Upon a Supercomputer — Technology Assisted Storytelling.” This is a talk I first developed quite a few years ago for the Faculty  Instructional Technology Summer Institute at the University of New Hampshire, and have given to a variety of other audiences since.  I really enjoyed meeting so many inspired educators, and sharing with them some of my ideas.  Specifically, I believe that we can learn from thousands of years of human experience, transmitting knowledge through story and apply that to the modern classroom. Imagine for a moment drawing on the power of the storytelling techniques that make a great movie so engrossing, and using them to make classroom lessons equally engrossing. I really believe that this is powerful stuff, and that by using technology effectively we can multiply its power.   This is really the next step from what I wrote in my recent post PowerPoint is the Enemy of Effective Communication!

When I have given this talk in the past, I’ve always handed out a list of resources which I thought would be helpful to teachers as they begin to implement the ideas that I shared. This is always been a single sheet of paper, basically a list of links. I’ve never really been happy with it, and I always felt there was a lot more that should be included. This time, I decided to do something about that. So, for the first time I’m giving a “digital handout.”  I want to share it with any of you who may be interested. It’s not completely finished yet, what I’ve done so far is an annotated list of software and hardware tools, which I felt would be useful and a few books as well. What I haven’t finished yet is going through the pages and pages of notes that I have on potential sources for content to use in presentations (images, audio clips, video segments and much more,) but that will be coming soon. Besides, I was shocked when I finished the first part of my list and discovered that it was over 2800 words. If you want to take a look, find it at http://andydolph.com/cmtc.  Understand, this list is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather a selective list of tools that I recommend. If you think there’s something that I should look at to include, please let me know about it in the comments below.