techieMusings

I know that the end of the trimester is typically a popular time for student presentations. So, I wanted to share a couple of tips that might be helpful in planning projects.  The goal of these tips is to encourage all students to actively engage with the presentations.

1. Have students present their Google Slides presentation using Pear Deck to engage their classmates

Here is a tutorial you can share with your students to get them up and running in Pear Deck. Having them present their Google Slides presentation using the Pear Deck Add-on is a great way to help encourage that presentations engage the whole class.

Tutorial: Getting Started with Pear Deck to Make Your Google Slides Interactive

2. Have students create a screencast of their presentation

You can use WeVideo to have students create a screencast of their presentations. In doing so, you might ask students to watch videos posted by their classmates for homework to free up class time for discussion surrounding the presentations, for example.

Tutorial: Creating a Screencast with WeVideo

3. Have students create a screencast of their presentation and then interact with classmates via Flipgrid

Flipgrid is an easy way to display all students’ videos without having to download or upload large video files. It’s easy for students to download their completed WeVideo project and then upload it to a Flipgrid link you provide them. (Note that when they upload a video to Flipgrid, it will remove all time limit restrictions, so longer video projects can be shared in this way.)

Tutorial: Uploading a WeVideo Project to Flipgrid

In doing this activity, you could have various sections of the same class interact with one another if you wanted to, which would be a unique opportunity to have students hearing from classmates they do not usually have the chance to learn with. Or, you could create separate Flipgrid topics for each class section.

One idea is to ask all students to first upload their presentations to Flipgrid. After all videos have been posted, you can ask students to create a video “reply” in Flipgrid to interact with several classmates’ videos. This will create a “threaded discussion” based on the video projects.

Similarly, you might ask students to take charge of test review with an activity like this. You can assign each student a problem to solve and ask them to screencast their solution. Then, instead of going over all of the answers on the board, you can provide students the Flipgrid resource on your class webpage/LMS for students to study from.