Lesson Reflection

Lesson Description                                                                                                                                                                                                       During this small group lesson, I worked with some of my fifth grade students to plan a presentation they have been researching for several weeks.  To start off the lesson, I showed them a PowerPoint I used to use when I was teaching environmental education about insects.  The presentation uses several different effects which I wanted them to see so that they would have an idea of what their presentation would look like in PowerPoint.  I also showed them a presentation from prezi.com as an alternative.  The students were instantly taken with the prezi presentation, so we decided that they would use that as their platform.  Next, I had the students do the tutorial and play around with a blank presentation for a while so that they could get a feel for how the software works.  After about ten minutes I had the students talk with me about their plans and answered any questions they had come up with.  They needed help importing pictures, so I showed them how to use the navigation buttons, and they got to work building their presentation.  While they were working, I realized that they could both work on the same presentation at different computers if they were working under different user names, so I quickly registered Nancy as a user and sent the link to the presentation to her account.  The students were delighted to both be working on the presentation at the same time and quickly began dividing up the tasks so that they were both working on different parts of the presentation at the same time.  I was impressed by how quickly they picked up the new program, and how user friendly Prezi was for our purposes.  The students will continue to build their presentations for the next several work sessions, and will present their topic to the class at a later date.

Differentiation

            This lesson was delivered within the context of a larger unit that is being highly differentiated for the students in our class.  The students I was working with were high achiving fifth grade students that were part of a group of students all doing independent research projects.  If I was to do this lesson with the entire class, I would have used more structure to allow students to be most effective.  These students had already done their research and taken notes on their subject; however, if I was working with students who were not as prepared, I would have used either a story board or some sort of other graphic organizer to have students pre-plan their presentations.  The program is intuitive enough that most students would be able to use the lessons after a quick introduction, so I think it would be most effective to trouble shoot any problems one on one after students have had a chance to explore the site.  If I was working with struggling writers, I could help the students by pre-typing a block of text for them and teaching them how to copy and paste the text into their presentation.  Because the software functions mostly with graphics instead of words, I think that most English language learners would be able to use the site with only a little extra scaffolding.

Communicating Expectations and Standards/Critical Thinking

            The expectations for this lesson, that students would choose and begin to create a presentation, was communicated to the students at the beginning of the lesson verbally. 

            While I was showing the students the different ways they might present their information, I asked critical thinking questions about the benefits and draw backs of PowerPoint and Prezi.  The students are also synthesizing the information they have gained through their research to create their presentations.

Improvement for the Future

            If I was to do this lesson again, I would have used a more structured graphic organizer for my students to create before they started their presentation.  Although the students that I was working with were able to easily translate their notes to their presentation, this might have caused problems for other students.  Another thing I would have changed if I was going to have students specifically working on presentations in Prezi, I would have shown the students an exemplar before they started researching because I think it would be a powerful motivator to do the research part of the project and get to the presentation building.