Reflection on PowerPoint Presentation

Ironically, the topic of my presentation was "Stress." Since I have shockingly never put together a PowerPoint presentation, it was a steep and stressful learning curve, albeit fun. The goals were to have the students define stress, identify stressful situations, learn ways of dealing with stress that are helpful, make an action plan for when an upcoming stressful situation occurs, and follow-up with reports of how successful their actions were.

The presentation I created included four short (2-3 minute) video clips from Discovery Education's United Streaming video "Don't Pop your Cork on Monday," three photos showing examples of expected student work, and an audio file to listen to. Most slides had a task to complete, whether group discussion, note-taking, art project, response to media, or planning page. Students in grades K-8 will be able to use it as a learning center as each slide explains what to do and expected outcome.

In most classrooms, the teacher would show the 13 minute video in one sitting followed by a quiz. One way that this presentation is superior to the traditional teaching is that students are able to spend more time with each topic in the video. To have a disciplined mind, Gardner reminds us that we must spend time digging deeper into the subjects. Just memorizing facts about stress does not demonstrate knowledge. With each slide, students are to pause and reflect on what they have heard or seen. A response is expected after small group discussions.

Another plus for this type of learning center is that students are learning in their "native language"-media. Although videos can be interesting, in this multimedia presentation students are interacting with the media, pacing themselves, and more involved in their own learning. A result is students who are interested in learning and able to succeed no matter what their "learning style" is. By having to personally respond to each aspect of the lesson they will gain more knowledge.

Having a deeper knowledge of stress is helpful, but unless they are able to synthesize the information in a different setting, learning is limited. Students began by putting content together from videos, classmates' perceptions, art and music to understand how stress looks and feels, yet the most important goal, of course, is for the students to take the information and be able to apply it to a new situation. With a lesson on stress, mastery would include having the students prepare for an upcoming stressful situation and be able to use the tools they learned and deal with it effectively. They are expected be able to come up with a personalized plan of action along with follow-up discussions later which will help them think critically about what was a good plan versus what could be improved. Meaningful connections are made and synthesized understanding occurs!