I've just returned from a TV/Video Educators conference. It was a frustrating experience. I am not very good at sitting and listening to people talk. The first session turned out to be a sales pitch. I thought I was going to learn something about the software, instead I was treated to an apple rep telling me how good the software is. Arghh! Thank you very much - I didn't pay money to come to this conference so you could sell me things that I already own.
The second presentation was a typical PowerPoint with lots and lots of text - and no hard or electronic copy of the presentation. The guy had an interesting project to share, but oh yeah - this is a TV/Video conference - how about showing some video...
The third presentation was much better - finally. She provided us with lots of materials (hard copy only) and showed us some interesting video both about the project and video from the project itself. She also left a lot of time for questions.
The final session was another sales pitch, this time for a TV/Video textbook written by the presenter...I went home.
In less than a month I am going to be presenting at the MassCUE conference about my podcasting project. How can I make my presentation interesting for people like me. I have one hour, one computer and a projector. I have some ideas - obviously I'm going to share my podcasts, I've created a wiki for all of the presentation materials, I want to create a podcast of people talking about the project (could be hard to do, since I am now working in a different school), I hope to use Google presentations and allow for some back channel chat and I was thinking about providing some time for people to turn to their neighbor and share some ideas.
What do you think? What was the best 1 hour conference presentation you ever attended? What made it great? Please share your ideas! I've cross posted this as a discussion over at Classroom 2.0 on ning. Please feel free to join the discussion there as well.
2 comments:
We use Google presentations with our class all the time. It has made presentations so much more interactive. I really like the idea.
I'm with you there, in terms of hating the sales pitches and the boring presentation. In our district, I went to a training for technology. It turned out to be three different reps trying to sell us on their own proprietary software, when the open source equivalents would suffice.
At the Learning in a 2.0 World in Maine last week, Vicki Davis did a 7 steps to a flat classroom presentation. She used Google Presentation with a backchannel, while live streaming on ustream. Why it worked? Because she planned for the interaction between the virtual participants and the f2f folks in the room. Presumably everyone comes to your conference with a laptop? This post from Diane Hammond points out why it worked.
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