Engagement Task 4 - Part 1 - PowerPoint, Prezi and Glogster

The first part of week 4’s engagement activity looked closely at 3 digital tools used to assist in presenting information, PowerPoint, Prezi and Glogster.

PowerPoint is a tool we are incredibly familiar with, as it is well utilized when studying at university. Sometimes this digital tool feels like it can place you into a deep sleep coma ‘death by PowerPoint’. However it was probably one of the first technologies I learnt to use, so I do have a soft spot for it and I feel like it still has a place within 21^st century classrooms.

Advantages:

·         Great to create flash cards which can be used as warm ups (explicit teaching) for all year levels.

·         Can suit all subject matter and be used to further engage students in content knowledge. For example: Maths- Year 6 Patterns and Sequences; enlighten students to Fibonacci’s Numbers through exploring PowerPoint slides.

·         It can support students in their assessment tasks e.g. oral presentations. Good idea to give students a guide as to how many slides and maybe what you would like presented.

·         Simple to use – formatting is similar to other digital programs.

·         Excellent substitution tool for lower primary students to begin to explore, good introduction to ICT’s.

Disadvantages:

·         Less is more – too much information defeats the purpose and it may as well be written on the board.

·         Have to hyper link any other information you wish to be displayed e.g. video etc. cannot be embedded into the presentation.

Diseases in Humans Caused by Micro-Organisms PP by Eliza Beere

Having used Prezi a few times for past group assignments – I seem to have lucked out and never actually created one personally. I think seeing how common this digital tool is within our university learning environment made me feel less apprehensive to create my own for this task.

Advantages:

·         The online program is very simple to use, there is a mixture of basic and complex templates. This offers a decent mixture for learners of different year levels and abilities to create their own Prezi.

·         The movements through the presentation (different directions, rotations, zoom features of slides) appear to be more exciting than that of PowerPoint.

·         Automatic save function – great for someone like me who has lost numerous sections of work because I never save reularly.

·         Presentations can be used for student-structured and teacher- structured tasks across an array of curriculum areas (the Prezi below demonstrates a Science experiment for lower primary students to complete).

·         Fantastic augmentation resource tool for students to use to create formative and summative assessment pieces and present them to the class – students can make them as elaborated as they please.

Disadvantages:

·         Adding more slides to a template can be a little frustrating. Trying to get them to connect and flow through with the rest of presentation was a little challenging.

·         If you accidently click on the screen (outside of the slide) it creates a text box where one is not wanted, after doing this a few times you soon learn quickly.

·         Trying to embed the html code within the blog – my Prezi presentation kept popping up over the top of the page (which the code was on) and I was unable to move it to copy the code.
 

http://prezi.com/ypiddh0jh_bf/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy 

Glogster, I first heard of a ‘glog’ during a first term assessment piece. I took one look at it and decided that maybe I would use one of the other online tools instead. Going back a second time I had similar feelings, however I  was determined to create my own ‘glog’.

Advantages:

·         There is a ton of engaging various layout options – great for those who like to get creative.

·         ‘Glogs’ can be used to create scrapbooks / posters over a number of cross-curricular areas such as History, English and Science (the example below reflects year 4 biological science).

·         Great online augmentation tool for a class to use while the learning manager guides them through the tasks.

·         The site would work well for upper primary students – it is interactive and engaging for learners.

Disadvantages:

·         It took a lot of playing around with (inserting video clips, images and audio), not as user friendly as other digital sites

·         The layout of a ‘glog’ can make it difficult for students to follow a specific order, without guidance – I feel there are better tools for this purpose such as Weebly.

·         Software on the computer needs to be current and up-to-date otherwise the Glogster site will not be functional.