Modern Languages Blog

Treating every slide as if it were your last means that when people stop paying attention to you - and they do - they can still get the whole gist of what you were saying on a particular point. The other important value here: if they do miss a slide it’s not going to stop them understanding what the following ones are about.

This is actually really difficult to do without filling the slide with 24 pt text, bullet points and clip art gallery swagger. But please, try to resist

What’s probably going to teach them something new is you, not the slide. Make the headline on the slide reflect the conclusion of what it is you are trying to say. For example, “I collect stick insects”. What the hell is the guy on about when his slide says “I collect stick insects”. Immediately, because of the headline which starts with the end of the story I am about to tell people are listening ever more intently to what it is I am recounting. They will remember the point I was making - that our students are experts in so many things - because of the potent combination of tips I’ve been giving over these past few days and the 72pt. text in which the slide was written.

It’s not the slide that’s going to get the information across, it’s you. Make sure that the slide, viewed on its own, is not essential to understanding the point of the whole presentation. Otherwise, you will lose people. If you want to have a document to share with people who missed the presentation or to support the presentation afterwards, then give them a type-written leaflet or essay, a bullet point crib or provide a screencast online, with the voice over, so that they can relive the presentation. Don’t just give them the slides, which were there to back you up.

What does treating every slide as your last do to your spoken explanations?
Do you find yourself using more of the tips together?

Yesterday, Heather in the comments said that it wasn’t possible to get away with 72pt text on a slide if you wanted to fit everything in. True, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Many PowerPoints lose their power because of the quantity of text and - sin of sins - copious bullet points which appear all at once. Microsoft, the creators of PowerPoint, even automatically reduce the text size as the text hungry presenter types in more and more. I’ve tried it just there. It keeps getting smaller until it’s down to 12 point. Just because a computer can doesn’t mean a teacher should.

Of course, to use such a large size of text on screen does require the teacher or student to put much less on at once. Using headlines, rather than sentences and typed out explanations, will actually have more of an effect - more lasting, certainly - than writing lengthy phrases that few students will bother themselves to read. It also prevents the presenter becoming a slide slave as they do this.

Using headlines means that small, punchy sentences highlight the main point being made. It liberates the teacher to explain in the way they want to, using the students’ reaction to shape each part of the presentation, and keeping what they teacher is saying - and not the slide - at the front of students’ minds.

Let’s take the example of a grammar-based lesson. If you’re explaining the past tense, for example, you probably use little catchphrases or headlines of your own. Yet, when we create a traditional presentation on this many teachers choose to use the inspiring “Past tense” or even “Verbs” (these came from you guys at the Communicate.06 conference as your all-time favourites

The problem with these headings is that they don’t differentiate between the different elements of the construction of the past tense.
What kind of headlines, not headings, could you use in a lesson today?
What works in trying to differentiate the content of each slide?

I posted about the Young Scot Lab in a Lorry which is traveling around the country at the moment. Ollie also commented on how to reserve it. Hamish now comments the following, which I reproduced here as it could be of interest to many MFL teachers:

I got this from the physics sputnick group:

Apologies to those - the majority - who are nowhere near the route proposed for ‘Lab in a Lorry’ when it next visits Scotland. Maybe there will be another visit in the future.

This is a message that I have received indirectly from IoP HQ:

“We are definitely going to come up to (you) Scotland for the w/c 15 May, however, due to the cost involved we will not be able to go much further north than Fort William.

I have asked for additional funding from Qinetiq who requested the lorry to go to the Hebrides to make this into a two week tour - however, they will not make a decision about this before 1 April.

Therefore, what I can do is start to put together a tour schedule for schools between Edinburgh and Fort William for the w/c 15 May. I do have a database of schools who have requested the lorry in the Edinburgh region and but would you be able to use your schools network to look for schools who may be willing to host the lorry on route to Fort William? I suggest that we stop at two schools in the Edinburgh region (which I can source) and three on the way up to Fort William.

We can stop at one school per day and accommodate 18 students per hourly session. We usually manage 5 sessions a day so can reach about 90 children at each school. Further information about the experiments we have on board and information for volunteers and hosts can be found on our website www.labinalorry.org.uk <file://www.labinalorry.org.uk>

I am sorry that I cannot offer you a full two week tour at this time, but I am doing my best to free up funds to make this possible.”

If you are somewhere near to the route between Edinburgh and Fort William. I’m not sure which route is planned exactly - perhaps it will be determined according to expressions of interest (within reason) - and would be interested in Lab in a Lorry coming to your school during the week in question, please contact Elizabeth Jeavans at the Institute in London elizabeth.jeavans@iop.org or Euan Macintyre on 07900 217 680

I hope that the week in question is not swamped by exams and thus inappropriate. We were not consulted about the choice of dates.

Good wishes

This one is related to points four and five. First, if you don’t want to be a slide slave, don’t put up everything you actually wanted to say. Second, if you’re getting kids to make up slides and you do not want them to copy and paste half of Google and present it as their own work, get them to use less text on screen.

How? Use 400pt text.

OK, maybe you can get away with 72pt, but make the text BIG. One of the educational consultants at Promethean, Ros Walker, was recently told by her optician that many, many more parents were bringing in their children for new glasses, but nothing was wrong with their eyesight. In fact, the teachers at school had been using text that was far too small on screen. Many say that 18pt text is the minimum for a PowerPoint. That might be true if the image is spread across the entire wall. But in a crowded classroom with a small interactive whiteboard the projector is normally too close to the board to create a large enough image. Keep that size about 72pt. and limit what you put on one slide.

What you have to say might be important, but say it. Nothing is so important that it should make your slide’s text fall below 72 pt. Just remember that if it does, and no-one can actually read anything clearly, your text may be breaking the back of the point you are trying to make.

Give it a go. What’s the effect on your audience?
Did they need to know all the personal pronouns to be able to make up their first past tense?
Did they need to copy eight new words from the board at once, all at different speeds?
Or were they happy to concentrate on copying three or four words well?

From NewsWise:

Analyzing test performance and computer uses of 986 fourth grade students from 55 classrooms in nine Massachusetts school districts, the study found that the more regularly students use computers to write papers for school, the better they performed on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Systems (MCAS) English/Language Arts exam. This positive effect occurred despite the fact that students were not allowed to use computers for the test.

Conversely, the study found that students’ recreational use of computers to play games, explore the Internet for fun, or chat with friends at home had a negative effect on students’ MCAS reading scores. Similarly, students’ use of computers to create PowerPoint presentations was also negatively associated with MCAS writing scores.

It would be so easy to use the PowerPoint to deliver, deliver, deliver, spoonfeeding anyone who will listen long enough. Getting students to create a PowerPoint might also seem like a good idea to get students creating something of their own. But, as the research indicates, this is not such a good idea. Students who are told to write as much as they can on a computer will tend to copy and paste from web pages found through Google.

However, if you get the students to apply these 10 tips - especially Point 6, out on Monday - then they will be forced into synthesising anything they find, forced into writing something original. This kind of activity will help their writing and speaking as copy and paste will not do the breaking down of information for them.

Rather than being given information on the internet or through a PowerPoint and doing little with it, try encouraging tasks that make the students recreate a summary of what they’ve seen and describe it in their own words.

CILT are looking for a UK participant to an ECML workshop on ‘ Language Quests’.  We are looking for material developers, teacher trainers specialized in second language acquisition who would be interested in attending this event which will take place in Graz, Austria  from 5 April - 8 April 2006.  

Candidates interested in being nominated to attend should request a Nomination Form from mary.ohene@cilt.org.uk which needs to be completed and returned to CILT as soon as possible as a result of time constraint. Travel and accommodation costs are paid for by ECML.

Students want to hear you, see you and talk with you - not the back of your head. Try not to read from the slides or, worse still, just turn round and stare at them. Engage with the people, not the slides.

Short and sweet today!

Update: More on how to do this might be found in Point 6: Learn where to find 400pt text.

This is the mantra of many a teacher, and once was mine. True, you can have the bones of many a presentation sitting on your hard drive (or uploaded on the MFLE), ready to bring out once a year when the unit in your textbook dictates.

But changing the bones for every class you teach is not as much an ordeal as it sounds. In fact, it can reduce the amount of work you need to do in the course of year.

How?
Try designing presentations on vocabulary and grammar so that the bones can be used for any course, any level, any age group. The basic preparation will take no more than it would for one class. Pack that presentation with all your ideas; don’t have one class in mind necessarily. Now, as each class approaches, delete the slides that are no use, not to their taste or not for that time of day. Rearrange any others that might spice things up, and “Save as…” with a class-specific name. Don’t forget to start with the end each time and to tell a story to get your point across.

What’s the alternative? Sticking with the same thing for different classes each year is boring for you, as you attempt the same exercise for the nth time with a different but oh-so-similar bunch of students as last year. Boring for the kids, above all, as the tedium you know you hold deep down at doing the same thing as last year creeps through into every word you speak.

Find your bones in a presentation, and add the muscle by removing the fat for each class.

When I was a kid at school I loved getting the teacher off point. My favourite teacher for that was Mr Whitehouse, my Modern Studies teacher. Modern Studies was also one of my best subjects. I think there was a definite link between storytelling in Mr Whitehouse’s class, remembering the facts he gave us in his engineered stories (well, I know that now) and being able to put it all together into reflective essays.

In Modern Languages what is it we are trying to do? We’re trying, in an ideal world, to get kids to use language, not just memorise bits of vocabulary and verb endings. We’re trying, ultimately, to get them to tell stories in a foreign language. Using a story to get the point across is the best way to that. Getting the kids to make up a story to remember a point is an even better way to do that.

Here’s an example:
Take the VerbCast, so eloquently described by one of the PiE students using it to learn her French verbs. When she talked about the past tense she could picture a red screen and the words dancing across this red screen right in front of her eyes. That’s a story helping her remember abstract elements. A PowerPoint on verb endings could work in the same way: all feminine words could come with a bright pink background, all masculines with a blue background, plurals with a green one. Verbal explanations or sentences could be presented against different backgrounds (but consistently the same ones throughout the school year/career).

Past Papers and storytelling
Past Papers could contain colour-based or graphic-based cues. Let’s face it; the same themes are going to come up in those exams until the end of all time. Why not tell a story using images which represent this key vocabulary, associating the characters of a story with the key themes in reading and listening papers?

On a simpler basis
If you have a lot of vocabulary to present to students why not get them to do all the work: find out what the words mean, put them together in a funny story en franglais or auf Deutschisch (mixtures of English and foreign tongue) and then tell the class their story.

If you’ve got this far - well done. Just remember: kids love stories. What stories have you and your students told today to try to learn something new?

When I was a student I worked briefly at the Edinburgh Evening News’ Pink, the sports newspaper that used to come out 15 minutes after full time on a Saturday afternoon. If there was one thing that was key to a good story, it was to give the full-time result in the first sentence, and then go on to describe how Inverness Caley managed to pull that off. The readers would always get to the end of a crazy story, even if they were struggling along the road juggling a pie, Bovrill and the paper in their hands.

The same thing makes for a great presentation in the classroom. Giving your lesson aim is already a positive step, so perhaps there’s nothing new in this. But when I suggest starting with the end of a presentation, I mean just that. Try showing the kids the final expected result of the lesson. And make that result implausible, off-the-wall, but, above all, something playful that kids will enjoy. Textbooks tend to miss that las point.

Here’s an example:
“Today we’re going to learn how to speak about things that happen in the future” or “We’re going to ‘do’ the future tense” is a lot drier and potentially lethal in PowerPoint terms than “Today we are going to say why we will not come to school tomorrow” (thanks to my anonymous front row prompt on Saturday who came up with that great idea). Immediately, the students are hooked on a crazy idea, something they don’t entirely understand either, but which they will get down to the bottom of before the end of the day. And talking about their creative ideas in English is fine at first - they will be that much more motivated to express what they want to say than what any textbook thinks makes an interesting example of the future tense.

So today, try starting one lesson from the end, making sure that the end of the story you’re spinning is a good one

Does it make a difference? Does it squeeze another minute or two of concentration out of the class?