Communicate What You Know - AND - How You Learned It

I often get asked the question, “What technology tool can I use to make presentations more interesting?  My students are bored with (insert common tech here, i.e. Slides, PowerPoint, Prezi, etc.).”

Yes, there are many online tools out there to help us create presentations.  However, I believe that the students aren’t bored because of the tool.  They are bored because all of the presentations give the same EXACT information they discovered on their own and put into their own presentation.  They are literally hearing the same information 5-20 different times.  Honestly, I’d be bored, too.  

And I was.  As I teacher, I used standard presentations in a lot of my group assignments.  I tasked my students with a learning objective and then, tagged on to the end of the assignment, they were asked to present what they learned.  Often this included a rubric where they were given what should be included in the presentation and even (ugh) the number of slides required.  Consequently I saw, essentially, the same presentation over and over.  And then I wondered why I wasn’t getting “better” presentations.

In my classroom, I had 3 objectives for the presentation:

1. Discover what the students learned in the project.
2. Ensure all students were exposed to each other’s learning to cover any gaps in their own project.
3. Develop student communication skills.

These are OK objectives and seemed to justify why presentations were included in most of my projects.  I usually achieved Objective 1, but I will admit that I could have done as good a job discovering that by reading their submitted project.  I thought I was achieving Objective 2, but as the boredom or disinterest set in, this benefit diminished.  And then there is Objective 3.  It seemed that, presentation after presentation, the students were not improving.  Just more of the same.

It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to watch presentations as a third party that the lightbulb went on.  I kept asking myself these new questions:

1. What if we didn’t save presentations for the end?  
2. What if we devoted an equal amount of class time (for me this was 2-3 class periods) to preparing presentations but sprinkled it throughout the project?  
3. What if the focus of the presentation wasn’t on the end result, but rather on the decision making parts of the project?  

OHHHH!  Every student or group goes through a different process in a project.  From the way they assign tasks to the decision to include/exclude information, they are all different.  It is in this process that learning happens.  It is also in this process that reflection can happen and deepen that learning.  I felt elated to discover a way to help students evaluate which assumptions or decisions led to their final conclusion.

The objectives for the presentation can still be the same.  However, we have a much better shot at actually achieving those objectives when the students are interested, the presentations are varied, and the focus is on their own process rather than on the outcome.  As a bonus, it doesn’t matter which tool we use.  The interesting part of the presentation isn’t the visual aid.  The interesting part is the presenter and his/her story.  And isn’t that where the focus should be, anyway?