Thursday, December 06, 2007

Killer Presentation

When one tries to describe the current state of technology and it's impact on education, it's difficult to help people understand the magnitude of the effect. I've done a few presentations for small groups about Web 2.0. Reading educational blogs and belonging to a couple of social networks really helps me learn about the Read/Write web. It's important to note however, that most of the people I know, my face-to-face friends don't have any idea. They don't use social bookmarking, the don't read, much less write blogs, and their feeling about wikis are really negative as a result of their limited understanding of wikipedia. My presentations are pretty lame compared to one that I ran across today on a blog that I read on a regular basis. Lucy Gray does an amazing job in her presentation The Winds of Change - Emergent Technologies in Education. I'm sure she had a few videos embedded in the PowerPoint so I wish I would have seen it live. The message is really thorough. Here are a few of my favorite elements of Lucy's presentation:
  • Today's teen - born in 1990 (same year as my middle son), and the technology that has become important throughout his life; there's something to think about.
  • Lots of statistics - not usually a big fan of numbers, but this message needs the numbers to back it up
  • The examples of blogs in chart form - really liked that all the blogs I read regularly are broken down in categories; teacher, student, professional development
  • Same with Wiki examples - (boy, someday I want to be a "heavy hitter" so my wiki would show up on a list somewhere)
  • List of cool web2.0 tools
Overall, I though Lucy's presentation was probably really compelling. It was thorough and provided a great deal of information. I'll bet her audience was really moved by her story. We all should be!



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