I am going my presentation for SCIE 6662 on the Mexican Gray Wolf. I selected this animals because they are amazingly beautiful member of the dog family. My fiance actually raised wolves back when he lived in Ohio and has shared many wonderful stories about the relationships he had with his wolves. He is actually proud that some of his wolves were transported and released to zoos and Yellowstone National Park. Now that I have selected an animal that peaks my interest, the next portion of the project requires selecting a Web Tool for my presenation. When looking over the requirments for the assignment, my initial thought is to use Power Point. Power Point is a wonderful, user-friendly, student-friendly presentation tool that can be used on almost any computer and viewed from almost any computer. There are a variety of clip arts, backgrounds, text styles, etc. on Power Point that allows presenters to make their presentations uniquely them.
The other part of me wants to step outside of my comfort zone and try something that I would generally not make the time to try during the academic year. Our district recently got a few sets of the Promethian Acti-voters and I have made use of them in my classes. The students enjoy the interactive voting machines they get to use and it really increases student engagement in the classroom. Like any technology it takes time to practice with and learn to efficiently use, especially in a classroom full of middle school students. The problem with using this as my presentation tool is that it will not be as effective without the computer software. I could still use the tool to make my presentation because the slides can be inserted in from power point. The professor of the course will see the power point version but will understand and see where the student engagement comes in with the scientific questions I can incorporate into the presentation. For example, when I show the Acti-vote presentation to my classes they can see a bar graph of the populations of gray wolves and they can answer the multiple choice question to analyze the trends over time. The professor, viewing power point, will only see the bar graph and four multiple choice answers.
I am also intrigued by Prezi. I made a brief outline of what I would want to incorporate into the presentation and tried to insert it into the Prezi software. It worked thanks to the many web tutorials that are out there for help. I like how different it is from Power Point and I believe that my students would like to see something new as well. I know many teachers who use Power Point but I am unaware of teachers using Prezi. I am torn on what to use but I believe I would like to give the Prezi software a shot. As always, I have a back-up plan...just incase.
