20 Second Presentation

Today in Shiver we worked on a 20 second presentation. I took an idea I heard at a presentation by Darren Kuropatwa and used what I had available.

I showed the students an image on the screen.  I then asked them what they might say if I asked them to talk while this image was on the screen behind them. **This is a take off of our last presentation, "My Life in 4 Slides."** There were lots of ideas given by the students: You could be taking about why you took the photo, or tell a story about the person or event in the photo, or you could talk as if you were in the photo and tell a story from that point of view.  The ideas were great.

I then showed them all the images that I put into a Keynote. Some of them I took others were obtained from Flickr.com (Creative Common Attributes).  They were then told to choose an image and if there was a conflict it was settled by a game of paper/rock/scissor.

Once they all had a piece of paper with the image they chose on it I told them that they had 10 minutes to come up with a 20 second presentation about that image where they had to talk for the entire time.  They will be presenting this to the class and that I will be taping it.  These were the criteria that I set for them.

IT WAS AMAZING what happened next . . . everyone got down to work.  I couldn't believe it.  They all started to write on their paper.  Some were point form others were fully written sentences.  It was very impressive to see.

I then mentioned that they should also practice their presentation and make sure it was a minimum and maximum of 20 seconds long.  This was also great to see.  Some of them thought they had a lot of material to say but stopped after 10 seconds.  Others went well past 20 seconds and really had to cut it back.

I too took one of the images and was walking around practicing what I was going to say and trying to focus on my presentation skills.

When it was all done the presentations were all different.  They took a variety of points of views and presented them well.  Some of them . . . mine included . .  ended a bit early leaving us standing there for a few seconds waiting.  This is of course a learning moment and we talked at the end about the importance of spending the time practicing before you present.  It is really impressive to see how these small presentations have built up their confidence when presenting.  Giving them only 10 minutes to plan and practice helped them focus the entire time on the specific outcome.

I think everyone did a great job.  Everyone who was in my Shiver class today (705 group #1) presented and didn't try to get out of doing it.  Now I need to figure out how to get the other 240 kids I teach to be as positive when it comes to presentations.

What's Next?
I think that I will do this again but I will give them the images but have them write a 20 second poem about the image and then present the poem to the class.