I found these beautiful notes from SXSW via Boing Boing where I saw Battledecks which led to this summary. credit Mike Rohde Powerpoint meets Karaoke in this battle of wits. Watch your favorite speakers craft an off-the-cuff presentation using slides they’ve never seen before. Eight competitors will have five minutes to complete their presentation. Three judges will score the participants based on their use of jargon, gesturing and credibility. Who will take home the trophy and who will totally choke? Come see for yourself! Two things came to mind for me. 1. Battledecks with your class. You set up a serious of slides that deal with your topic. Divide the class into groups and give out the deck. They’ve got X minutes to come up with the content to match the slides. Points are awarded for relevancy, creativity/entertainment, jargon etc. For English, this could get really creative. It’d be an awesome way to do work with vocabulary words or story structure. They could pitch a story Hollywood style using as many vocabulary words as possible while working the story through the basic steps (rising action, etc). You could add difficulty by forcing genres on the students (nice way to review those elements as well). Now, this won’t work at all if you’re giving them traditional bullet point slide decks to […]
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I like you Outsiders Vocab Blog, I can see why the kids were engaged. When I did my first wiki with 6th graders in my gifted classroom we were able to work all day on it. My favorite comment ? “Boy, I’m glad we didn’t have to write!†(hello….you just spent the whole day writing!!)
Some teachers just don’t get it, the smallest change in delivery can engage the most unengaged.
Unrelated question I can’t get anybody to answer…tried a couple of other English teachers. I think I read somewhere that urls in citations are not suppose to be active links. Is that true? Does it matter? Email me if you have the answer.
I attended your EdTech session and have shared your Shakespeare story with faculty preparing to teach online. I notice your slides of Bob on Blogs is linked here. I am preparing a workshop for faculty on-campus and would like to use your humourous introduction. I am asking for permission to show it and will definitely give you the credit. If not, I can at least share your site and let them review it on their own.
Great job! I wish I had been a student in your class!
LT,
Feel free to use it. I’m glad you enjoyed the presentation and I’d certainly appreciate you sharing the site.
Tom