Monday is our last instructional day and kind of a problem child.รย For reasons I can’t quite pinpoint, more final review seems out of the question.รย I know we’ll discuss the weighting of their final grade and why, at 10%, they shouldn’t stress about this dumb show-to-us-all-over-ag’in test.รย So what do I do with the hour?รย If I hadn’t already blown the activity Rich pitched me it’d be perfect here: tactile, fun, self-contained, age inclusive.
Got anything like that to share?
I realize that the intersection of entertainment and education is kind of an overdone theme around here. I keep flogging it, though, even past the point of flatlining, because, well, I dunno, everyone’s gotta have a niche, right? I mean, what’s yours? The successful and satisfying implementation of twenty-first-century technology in the classroom? Ha! Sorry, pal. I know these people and that’ll never fly around here.
So anyway, I was watching Zoolander the other day for reasons I’d rather not get into or even recall but I knew afterwards I had to share something that Hollywood gets so very right about education.
Just sitting around, planning, readying myself for the largest anticlimax of my life.
Previously
Introduction
Your first slide is crucial. Cru. cial.
Your first slide establishes your presentation’s identity and even if you only fire up a projector three times a semester or present at only one conference, your presentation needs an identity. If you plan on presenting your lessons every day for a year (as has been my m.o.) this is quintuply important.
The reason is simply this: you don’t want your audience distracted by what your presentation looks like at the expense of what it’s about. No matter what my slides are about, they share a similar look.
This is priceless. In a matter of days, my students forget that the body text (Tahoma) looks different from problem information text (Gill Sans). They could tell you that the slide backgrounds are light blue but they forget that I use a gradient. I set problem answers to a darker shade of the background blue, but after a week, the look of the slide becomes so transparent, half the class would tell you it’s black. They never noticed the line breaks (always 10 points) or the reliable indentation (headers always 12% off the side; body text 3% more) or a dozen other elements I painstakingly built into the template with the express intention of rendering them totally, and completely, invisible.
