It’s been a hectic few weeks in October and November, but I’m delighted to share the slidedecks from three fabulous conferences I’ve been honored to experience this autumn. Below are the PDFs and embedded slides from each event; not only was I lucky to see old friends and make new ones, but I had a wonderful time sharing ideas as well as learning from my peers. Many thanks to all conference organizers and participants for your exceptional hospitality!
FAME (Florida Association for Media in Education) Fall 2012 Closing Keynote: People, Partnerships, and Participatory Culture–The Core of School Librarianship (October 2012)
Michigan Library Association Annual Conference Fall 2012 Youth Luncheon Keynote: Participatory Librarianship–Creating Enchantment and Conversations for Learning (November 2012)
I am delighted to be participating in several panel/group presentations with some of the best and brightest in our profession this week in New Orleans at ALA Annual 2011! I’ll be creating posts later this week for each session that will include slidedecks as well as relevant links and/or resource pages for each presentation that I hope will be helpful to participants attending the sessions as well as those who are following from afar. If you are attending ALA Annual 2011 in NOLA, I hope to see you at one of my sessions!
I want to thank the wonderful educators of the Griffin-Spalding County School System in Griffin, Georgia for inviting me to present a keynote speech and four concurrent sessions this past week at their Teachers as Learners Conference. Below are resources from two days of learning and sharing!
Thanks to the incredibly gifted Kim Cofino, I finally took the leap and created a presentation using the principles of “Presentation Zen” outlined by Kim in her wonderful post from January 2009. After stumbling on one of her presentations in SlideShare through a friend from Twitter, I was in awe and subscribed to her blog. Consequently, I came across her post and decided I wanted some presentation zen, too! If you have seen Kim’s work, you know how inspiring and talented she is; I also appreciate her being so generous in sharing all her pearls of wisdom in her blog post on principles of presentation zen.
Our district has two technology integration programs called Teach 21 and Media 21 (media specialists). One of the courses, “Introduction to Information Literacy”, is taught by three other media specialists and me. We have been offering the course for about a year now, and like any other class, we are constantly fine tuning it. I decided for my night that I would try to use a “Presentation Zen” style PowerPoint to facilitate discussion.
As Kim suggested, I decided to create a storyboard with three main “areas” of concentration. My job was to focus on the concept of research pathfinders, GALILEO (our state’s virtual library), and NoodleTools; I also included a small subsection on emerging sources of authority and social scholarship.
The most difficult part of creating the presentation was finding the images. I started with the Creative Commons search Kim suggested, but eventually changed over to the advanced search feature in Flickr to search photos with specific types of Creative Commons licenses. Because I had such a wealth of images to use, it took much longer than I anticipated to find the “just right” image for each idea. In addition to those images, I found a wonderful selection of images within Microsoft Clip Art (try the live search) I was sure to provide a photo attribution for the Flickr images on each slide as well.
Additionally, I incorporated this YouTube video to help frame the idea of students developing personal learning networks for research; the video is embedded in the SlideShare presentation.
After taking all of her suggestions to heart, I worked on it for about seven hours into Monday evening, and I then worked on it through the wee small hours of the morning into early Wednesday. It was a labor of love, but it was well worth the effort! I really enjoyed the creative process of blending ideas and images together, and while I see a few changes I would make, I am really proud and pleased with how the presentation looks. I definitely recommend the “Presentation Zen” approach to anyone who may be preparing an upcoming presentation to a group even if it is more instructional in nature like mine.
I did supplement the main PowerPoint with a course page on SharePoint and a shorter PowerPoint designed to be more of a handout on the course page (which is not available to the public at this time….it is housed on our district’s SharePoint training site…I’m sorry you can’t see it for now!).
I plan to continue using this model for future presentation, and I am getting ready to tweak an existing presentation to convert it to this style. Many thanks to Kim Cofino for so generously sharing her insights and advice with all of us as I think this mode is going to help me create and deliver more effective presentations!
