Ringing CHIMES

They Snooze You Lose

Chapter 4

Ringing CHIMES

                Lynnell Burmark’s dental hygienist makes a hilarious analogy “You don’t have to floss all your teeth.  Just the ones you want to keep.”  In education that might not be as funny.  In our agitated teaching routine we might overlook the delivery of content because of the pressures on all the skills that need to be taught.  This in the long term makes us monotonous and ineffective.   In this chapter it describes the two things we need to do in order to be effective in our presentations.   The skill presented needs to get students or audience’s attention by making it relevant and not extravagant.    How do we make our presentations stick to the memories of our audience?  Making connections and evoking images it’s crucial for a presentation to be successful.  Burmark refers to the CHIMES   as hooks to make a presentation stick to the audience and that perhaps the rule should be to attract and not distract.

Tweaking Presentations

They Snooze You Lose

Chapter 1

Tweaking Presentations

                In this chapter Lynell Burmark introduces us to the different ways we can improve our old power point presentations.  Burmark states that color, type face, and visuals make a difference between a boring or successful presentation.  It is estimated that about 30 million power point presentations are given around the world daily, and the majority of the audience pay no attention to them.  Burmark suggest giving our old power point presentations a “tweak” to make them more appealing to viewers.  She suggests that is as easy as changing templates, color, and type.  When changing or choosing a template think of what is intended to communicate and our personality.  It has been studied that when the right scheme of color is applied to a power point the audience comprehension and retention is greater than what black and white visuals provide.  She went ahead and explains that warm colors are seen before cool colors.  So it would be a good idea for now on to use yellow and reds in our presentations.  It is very common to see presenters using the newest technology available, yet they continue to use the same old practices.  Instead we should use more pictures and fewer words.  Nancy Duarte mentioned that presentations should be like billboards.  If our message is processed effectively within seconds, we are in the right track.

Reflections

So far this semester has begun with many new and exciting assignments!  I have enjoyed creating a Wordle, I can see this been a hit in my classroom.  Creating and uploading my power point to the e portfolio has been challenging, but I am determined to do it!  When working on the copyright power point the thought that kept crossing my mind was to provide useful information to my colleagues.  I found very interesting that we have ownership of our work as soon as we hit the save button.  I had never look at it that way.  Many times we unconsciously misuse someones copy rights, and the electronic articles were very insightful.  I just hope that as I learn all these new things everything starts to fall into place. : )