HOW I GUIDE MY STUDENTS TO MAKE POWER POINT PRESENTATIONS

Students do not necessarily LOVE the idea of making presentations. They may have their own and very valid reasons for this and two of them - to me- seems to stick out ; 

• They have never spoken in front of a group before ( esp. IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

•    They may feel peer pressure (What are 'the others' going to think and say about me and my English?)

Every teacher has their own way of overcoming these challenges. To me, creating a positive classroom environment and teacher’s proactive attitude are the two very important things to kick the ball rolling in the class. These two are like SPINACH AND YOGURTJ. You simply can not have one without the other.

I made an attempt to handle things  in a more 'constructive' way and to put it simple, constructivism is to start with what students already know and build on it.
In the following video, you will find the video of one of my student’s presentation. She is a beginner level student and this is her first presentation:

or you can follow the link to watch the video:

                                                                        http://vimeo.com/30959051

The topic of the presentation is ' Introduce your best friend'. Simge prepared three drafts and made some pre-presentations - to her mom and to me and a couple of students- before actually presenting the one above.

(In the video, Simge is not in her class, but in another one)

Before the students in the video watched Simge's presentation, they were given a sheet of paper divided into three columns [Things I liked/ Things I don't like so much/ Things I learned]

While the students in the video watched Simge’s presentation, they wrote down all the things they liked, didn't liked so much and things they learned from this experience.

After the presentation, everybody walked around the classroom and shared their ideas. Here you can see how it looks:

Finally, students worked in pairs and wrote down what they think are the key points to an effective presentation. Then we stuck them on the walls. Here are some of the ideas they come up with:

do not write a lot of sentences on one slide            

                                               use interesting& lots of pictures

eye contact is important

use bullet points on slides         

                                                 INTERACTION IS VERY IMPORTANT

And here are  task specific ideas they come up with:

         

give more details about your friend      

           

                                                   give some interesting details      

 SIMGE, you are a very self-confident student! I am proud of you.

 I would like to thank Mert for technical support:)

And I would like to thank my colleague NISA for answering all my questions patiently about blogging