I hate to admit, but in the past, I have made power point presentations to present content to students. (What's done is done.) I was never convinced that this was a good way to share information, but I gave it a go, and discovered what I already knew. Way back when, I even tried to print off the slides to accompany the slideshow. All I managed to do was provide students with the power to doodle in the margins, color in all the o's and find tons of ways to zone out.
I have even sat through professional development, and college courses, where I've paid good money for someone to monotonously flip through slides, while I pretend to follow along with a print off of the slides. Let's face it, it doesn't work.
So how is this tool any better?
Well, it is not just your regular presentation tool, it is truly interactive! I tried this last week with a lesson about parallax. I've found that this concept requires a lot of drawings, sketches and measurements. So, I tried this out with a few basic slides. When the class started and students started to put away their phones, and devices, I said..."wait a minute, you are going to need those for the first 10 minutes of class. Take them out and go to this site swipe.to/9279j"
We dove into parallax and guess what? They were actually paying attention, following along, taking notes, and asking questions.
I thought this was just some kind of fluke. So I tried again with a different lesson. This lesson was a collaborative reading and a discussion activity. It worked out great!
swipe.to/9215j
In the end this is a great tool and provides a really great interactive way to present lesson material. I am excited to try it with Professional Development courses I have coming up soon.
It is also a great tool to make student presentations more engaging for their classmates.
Try it out. It's really easy and fun.
