When Gever Tulley presented to his TED audience, he took advantage of his own images and an amazing roller coaster video clip to send home his message. His slides are a clear example of how much more powerful real world images can move the audience to action. You won't find a single bullet point or long paragraph of text in any of his slides. Instead, you SEE his content, which in turn allows you to visualize and feel his message.
I was ready to speed off to Home Depot, buy my own tools, nails, screws, and large quantities of wood and start my own backyard Tinkering School. His passion had moved me to action. His multimedia provided a strong case for his position as to why kids needed to explore. If he had used the standard PowerPoint presentation format, like the one I created below, it would not have been the same. So, please remember that the example below is what NOT TO DO.
As a presenter, when you have images and videos of the content you are presenting, use them, in fact, abuse them. Now is not the time be bashful or too embarrassed to show off your work. No one remembers a slide full of text or bullet points, images and video will move your audience to action.
In the field of education we are in a constant debate and struggle on how to best educate the children in our schools. Terms and teaching philosophies like differentiation, brain-based instruction, response to intervention, constructivism, direct teaching, active learning, the Socratic method, and many, many, many more are used on campuses every single day in the effort to help students learn the content. I have found the video below to be a truly inspirational one, because the lessons learned by the children in the video are devoid of a standard curriculum or program. The kids have been entrusted to use power tools, nails, 2 x 4s and other unimaginable materials that would never be allowed into our schools.
What grabbed my attention about the Tinkering School is that the kids begin with an idea, a vision, a concept which will develop to fruition through hard work, trial and error, practice and constant revision. Not to be overlooked, in my opinion, one of the most important skills we can teach students, is what to do when something fails. The goal of every classroom is to have successful students, but we tend to forget that the process of failure is a critical component of success. The best thought out plans don't tend to work the way we envisioned them. Which causes us to either revise our ideas or even abandon an idea and to start from the beginning. In the real world, where innovation is constantly being pushed to the edge, failure and innovation work together hand in hand. Thomas A. Edison realized failure was something we couldn't live without, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
The Tinkering School forces students to think, revise, create, test, and sometimes start all over again. Many classrooms use Bloom's Taxonomy to stress the importance of varying the level of questioning to push students to another level of thinking. If you haven't checked out Bloom's lately, the newly revised version of Bloom's no longer ends with Evaluation. Evaluation and Synthesis have switched places at the top of the pyramid, the nouns are now verbs, and Creating sits at the top. From visiting the Tinkering School's website and viewing Tulley's presentation I have a pretty good feeling that the students are exposed to the full level of Bloom's without the overt explicitness as we see, in good faith, sometimes posted in our classrooms. How often will your students get the chance to tinker today?
If you attended my PPT Redux workshop, or have read Presentation Zen or Slideology, you may be familiar with the "Rule of Thirds". The rule helps the designer create slides that are more visually appealing by placing the focal points of an image, text, or graphic on a slightly off-centered point. We tend to place our visual elements in the center, thinking it's the correct position to place them, but more often than not, we can utilize these guidelines to present an even stronger visual element. The article below, written by Apollo Ideas does a great job of defining the rule and describes it's role & purpose in creating stunning slides.
I had about 25-30 minutes to present on significant disproportionality at the TCASE Midwinter Conference. I didn't have access to a document camera or an overhead projector. I decided to use pdf screenshots of my document and orange arrows to ensure the audience could follow along with my overview of the data analysis document. I used the image of a see saw as my visual mnemonic to illustrate & define significant disproportionality. A lot of the slides won't make sense without my narration, but they may serve as examples.
Garr's slidedeck utilizes text, images, and humor to provide a preview into Dr. Medina's great book. The book is an easy read and makes nueroscience fun and interesting. Dr. Medina also provides a lot of insight into how we can improve our teaching practices with just a little bit of knowledge on how the brain functions.
These are the slides I created to serve as an introduction to my PPT REDUX workshop. Along with the images to help illustrate my message I used white/empty space to focus the eye and grab the readers attention to the text.
David Carson gives a funny and powerful presentation on the world of design using full sized screen shots of his own pictures and previous work to convey his message. Sorry, no bullet points.
Juan Enriquez gives an amazing presentation on the future of our financial crisis and in rebooting our species. I was drawn to his presentation by his use of visuals and humor in what would normally be considered a very serious and possibly boring subject. He easily could have used plenty of bullet points, charts, and graphs, but instead he uses a full sized image of Santa.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in a two minute interview shares his thoughts on evolving as a company, the customer experience, and how failure is the key to invention.
