One of our great challenges as teachers is encouraging students to use a wider range of presentation styles.
Movies can be a great way to bring a range of text types to life, making publishing and sharing student work much more accessable and increasing the access to and impact of their work.
Xtra Normal is a great example of a simple and powerful presentation tool that may be useful in your classroom. Students simply sign in, paste their product (text) into a text box and have it presented by a 3d avatar. Students can choose from a range of backgrounds, characters, speech styles, expressions and more. Best of all its free.
The movie below is an example of a social justice project where students were working on a short information report on a ways to reduce your eco-footprint.
Note :- A first time user took 10 minutes to take their written content and create their movie.
The Diocesan Public Speaking Competition was held last week. Once again the quality of the speakers was exceptional and they should all be very proud of their efforts. Stay tuned for the podcasts of the finals, recorded, edited, produced and published by year 6 at St Francis Xavier.
As I mentioned last post one of our year 5 classrooms decided to use the podcasts of the public speaking. To quote the teacher
“We are focusing on text type ‘review’ in English at the moment ..so it fitted in naturally….plus I wanted to expose the the students to podcasts”
This was the first time the class had listened to podcasts and the student response was really interesting. Below is one boys quick review of the morning session
“I enjoyed listening to the podcasts during this morning’s session of learning. We listened to the public speaking finals and we were able to hear most of the speeches. One of the speeches was on ‘School is important’. That one claimed the winning prize. The next speech we heard was a speech about ‘My worst nightmare’. That one captured the second prize. The last one out of the three speeches was on ‘Creating Peace’. As we were listening to the speeches, we created a mind map to summarise the speech that was our favourite. After that was done, we were able to hear Lance Lagaspi’s speech. Everyone in the room thought that Lance should of come first, not third. His speech was on ‘Creating Peace’ and we thought that it was the best out of the speeches that we heard.
Listening to the podcasts was a great experience for us. I think it is much easier to listen to podcasts, instead of paying money to go to the actual venue….even though the public speaking comp was free …but we were all stuck back at school. Podcasts can be listened to when you’re walking, jogging, biking, working out in the gym, meditating, listening to it in the car and during many other times. They can even be downloaded onto an ‘Ipod’. Having the chance to listen to podcasts is an incredible experience and I’m sure that I will be listening to many podcasts later on in the future. “
Last Friday I was lucky enough to attend the Diocesan Public Speaking Competition. I was particularly taken by the quality of the speakers, their presentation and the way they connected with their audience.
One of our schools has already started using the podcasts, “At the moment both Year 5 classes are listening to the podcasts and creating mind maps. These mind maps will be used as planning for a written review of the podcast speeches.”
Entries (RSS)
