Where Can Teaching Lead You? – My Digital Story
Please feel free to follow the above link to my digital story.
To enter the slide show manually, the address is as follows: http://prezi.com/zm9u0s1bqg8b/etec-565-my-digital-story/
Why This Story?
I’ve had a lot of fun on my journey in pursuing a teaching career. I’ve learned so much with each teaching opportunity and I wanted to highlight some of the main ones. I still remember the discussions with my high school teachers after school, and their advice in looking for the opportunities that come and not being afraid to take them. Because I followed their advice, I have ended up where I am now. I am glad I listened, and I would like to share with others what I have learned.
Communications & English Class
One of the components in Communications and English classes is to tell a great story using multimedia. With Prezi, students are able to add their thoughts in text, visual, and audio to tell their story. To generate the story, they can learn to create concept maps. My students generally groan when they hear the word “Mind Map” or “Concept Map”. The trouble with concept maps is that it is hard to change or edit once it is written. With Prezi, the concept map is interactive and easy to edit.
Another lesson would be organization skills. Students organize their thoughts in different ways – and Prezi is great for this reason. For example, I have grouped together my thoughts for the presentation, but it is not necessary to tell the story in this way. Prezi has the option to determine how you want the content presented through “Paths” – in another sense, showing the audience your train of thought for how you want to tell your story. Therefore, you can have all your thoughts on paper, but you can still choose what to show to your audience.
I think this tools is a great way to encourage students to be creative when practicing their story telling skills. The program is interactive and fun, making it easy to create and move ideas around. The option of uploading files is convenient as well. Overall, it is a fun way to share your ideas with others.
Limitations
Although the presentations can be portable (saved in a zip file), the files may be too large to upload/download easily for classroom use. Internet access is necessary, especially when showing presentations with YouTube videos or other clips online. Although background music is an option, voice narration can not be recorded and played across the slide show (although I will have to look into this more closely). The program cannot be downloaded, so students will need access to computers and Internet to create their own Prezi. With functionality, the font styles are limited and the choice of font colours is not an option (or hard to find?). Although more options may be created and developed in the future, limited choices can also an advantage to help keep students focused on the task at hand. In general, Prezi is a tool that I would like to continue to explore in the future.