8 Classic storytelling techniques for engaging presentations A good public speaker takes their audience on a journey, leaving them feeling inspired and motivated. But structuring your speech to get your ideas across and keep your audience engaged all the way through is tricky. Try these eight storytelling techniques for a presentation that wows. You’re doing a presentation, so you start with the facts you want to get across. Wrong! Humans are hardwired for stories. Deliver a presentation that captures the hearts and heads of your audience by stealing one of these classic storytelling techniques. 1. The monomyth (also called the hero’s journey), is a story structure that is found in many folk tales, myths and religious writings from around the world. In a monomyth, the hero is called to leave their home and sets out on a difficult journey. After overcoming a great trial, they return home with a reward or newfound wisdom – something which will help their community. Good for: See also: The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: Here Is A Collection of Some New Educational Web Tools and Apps for Teachers August 4, 2015 An important part of an effective integration of technology in your instruction besides knowing the ‘pedagogical whys’ behind the tech choices you make is finding out the appropriate web tools to enhance your teaching. And this is where curated lists such as the ones we provide in NewEdTech series come in handy. In today’s selection, we are introducing you to some new web tools we discovered through Edshelf. Enjoy 1- Sway ‘Sway makes it quick and easy to create and share polished, interactive reports, presentations, personal stories, and more. 2- School Font ‘School Font is a simple writing program. 3- Wixie ‘Wixie is an online publishing and creativity platform that lets students share what they know through their writing, their voice, and their art.’ 4- Lyrics Gaps A fun method to learn and improve your foreign languages like English through music and typing in song lyrics. 5- Youblisher 6-WriteReader 7-PhotoPeach 8- Davinci Note 9- Story Spark 10- Writing Prompts for Kids
20 - Blended or Flipped Classrooms What is a Blended Classroom? A National Education Association (NEA) Policy Brief on blended learning states: ...blended learning (aka hybrid and mixed-mode) is an environment in which: a student learns in a blended model of face-to-face instruction with a licensed teacher and technology-based instruction that best meets the educational needs of the student.During the technology-based instruction, under the guidance of the teacher, the student has control over the time, place, path and/or the pace of the curriculum to form an integrated instructional approach. Watch the following video to learn more about blended learning in the classroom. We also suggest that if you are interested in learning more about blending your classroom that you check your local ISD for the Blended Learning in the Classroom Course (BLiC) a REMC Association project. What is a flipped classroom? About the Flipped Classroom Johnathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams are considered the originators of the flipped classroom. 1. 2.
The 100 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You The Wordle of this list! (Click image to enlarge) One of the most popular posts on Edudemic in 2010 was The 35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You and I felt it might be time for an update to that list for 2011. In order to put together a list of the best Web 2.0 classroom tools, I polled my Twitter followers, Facebook fans (are they still called fans? There were more than 900 submissions but many were duplicates. How to tell a great story, visualized A good story can make a campfire that much eerier. A good story can flip a conversation at a party from completely awkward to wonderful. Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great storyA good story can glue your nose to a book. So, uh, how do you tell one? Andrew Stanton, the Pixar writer and director behind both Toy Story and WALL-E, has many ideas, and he shared his expertise in his TED Talk, The clues to a great story. (See also the first infographic in this series, illustrating David Blaine’s experiment to hold his breath for an astonishing 17 minutes.
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: Two Awesome Apps for Creating Talking Pictures August 18, 2015 Here are two free iPad apps you can use with students to create talking pictures. Both of these apps allow you to record your own voice to use as a voice-over in your photos. 1- ChatterPix Kids ChatterPix Kids is a very good iPad app you can use with your students to create animated photos and doodles. The app is very easy and simple to use and has a student friendly interface with no learning curve. Animated pictures created by ChatterPix Kids can be shared with others as playful messages, creative cards or even fancy book reports. 2- FaceTalker FaceTalker is another good free app for making pictures talk. ‘FaceTalk is also great for education.
In Successful Edtech, Pedagogy Comes First—Devices Second Ken Eastwood is the superintendent of Middletown City School District, NY, a member of our League of Innovative Schools. In terms of student proficiency, today's classrooms are more diverse than ever. We're "detracking" students previously sorted by ability. We're mainstreaming those with special needs. And we're serving more and more students who are just learning English. In these classrooms, teachers face a seemingly impossible task -- providing effective instruction to all the unique students under their care. Educational technology (edtech for short) can play a significant role in mitigating and solving this growing dilemma. An increasing amount of data around personalized educational models like "blended learning" and content-specific software suggests that edtech makes instruction in diverse classrooms more efficient. Yet these student growth gains are not reflected in most edtech implementations. So, what can be done? This recommended approach doesn't mean picking will be easy.
Write or Die 2 Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 7 New EdTech Tools for Teachers September 9, 2015 In this month's 'New Educational Web Tools' series, we are sharing with you this selection of interesting web tools and apps we have been curating over the last few weeks. The purpose is to keep you updated about the latest in the EdTech world and introduce you to some useful applications that might be of an added value to your teaching. Enjoy ‘Made with Code is an initiative to champion creativity, girls, and code, all at once. ‘FormSwift is a tool to help you quickly and easily create, edit, sign, and collaborate on documents and forms. Quizizz is a fun multiplayer classroom activity, that allows all your students to practice together. Select one of the public quizzes or create your own.Click "Play" to generate your unique game code.Ask your students to open join.quizizz.com and enter the game code.See students joining on the live dashboard, and launch when ready.The game begins! ‘Feeling stuck?
The 4 X 4 of Personalized Learning - Part 1 Today nearly any time that you are online you are constantly provided with personalized content: music, shopping, dating services, entertainments, etc. You constantly receive content and information that are relevant to your needs and interests. And this personalization remains true even in your everyday life, away from screens: At the gym, your activities are personalized, through dashboards, data and even trainers. At the mall, if you can afford it, you can get your personal shopper; at work, you may be personalizing strategies and communications to your clients. Education doesn’t have to be an exception. While how we can personalize learning experiences is new, the idea of doing it isn’t. Being part of an education company that helps many school districts around the nation, with their personalized learning journey, I have learned a tremendous amount. Promise 1:More efficient and effective learning: Promise 2: More time for teachers to focus on each student: The industrial era is over.
How To Write A Novel Using The Snowflake Method Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. That’s just life. Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell you how to write a novel. In this article, I’d like to share with you what works for me. This page is the most popular one on my web site, and gets over a thousand page views per day, so you can guess that a lot of people find it useful. Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed. For a number of years, I was a software architect designing large software projects. I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. If you’re like most people, you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. But before you start writing, you need to get organized. Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. When you later write your book proposal, this sentence should appear very early in the proposal. Some hints on what makes a good sentence:
Educational Technology and Mobile Learning: 10 Excellent Google Drive Apps Teachers Should Try This School Year August 28, 2015 Here is another back-to-school goodie for teachers. This is basically a selection of some of the best educational Google Drive apps to use in your instruction. As is the case with Mac, Chromebook, and Chrome lists, all of these apps have been covered in separate review posts in the past and are also deemed to be among the most popular among teachers and educators based on the feedback we received following their publication. "This extension allow you to save web content directly to Google Drive through a browser action or context menu. You can save documents, images, and HTML5 audio and video all by right clicking and selecting 'Save to Google Drive'. MindMeister is a very good tool students can use to create mindmaps and brainstorm complex topics. 3- GeoGebra GeoGebra (www.geogebra.org) is free dynamic mathematics software for all levels of education that brings together geometry, algebra, spreadsheets, graphing, statistics and calculus in one easy-to-use package.
Preparing Teachers for Personalized Classrooms This post first appeared on CompetencyWorks on December 5, 2016. This is the nineteenth article in the series Implementing Competency Education in K-12 Systems: Insights from Local Leaders. One of the necessary steps to ensure a district is creating a student-centered culture rather than one solely driven by standards is to prepare teachers for managing personalized classrooms. Pittsfield School District provided professional coaching courses for all their teachers. Don Siviski, former Superintendent of RSU2, describes eliminating all travel and non-related professional development in order to stop doing what wasn’t working and marshalling all resources to supporting teachers to prepare for the transition to proficiency-based learning. Many schools fall into a trap in the first years in that they teach learning continuum in a rigid, linear fashion because they have been written that way. Three Things to Think About #3 Beware of how “time is a variable” can be interpreted.
WRITING TOOLS Character Pyramid Tool (PDF) Visualize your character’s FLAWS & associated behaviors (for a deeper understanding of this tool, please reference The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws) Character Target Tool (PDF) Organize and group your character’s POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES by category: moral, achievement, interactive or identity (for a greater understanding of this tool, please reference The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes) Character Profile Questionnaire (PDF) Not your average character questionnaire! Reverse Backstory Tool (PDF) Work backwards to find your character’s wound, needs & lie (for a deeper understanding of this tool, please reference The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws) Weak Verb Converter Tool (PDF) Transform all those generic, boring verbs into power verbs Scene Revision/Critique Tool Level 1 & Level 2 (PDF) A ‘light’ and ‘in-depth’ revision checklist for creating compelling characters and scenes