As attested throughout this blog (and just about anywhere else you are likely to find my work), I love to share and I never claim to know anything more than Plato has Socrates claim:
The only thing I know is that I know nothing.
Socrates
But I do feel compelled to share. It’s only human.
I would like to share today how I believe we all model literacy, in all forms, for our students daily. In the way we carry ourselves, the manner in which we speak, make visuals to aid in our teaching, layout websites, write, create wikis, make slideshows (both the photo kind and the information disseminating kind) and, well… I think I’ve made this point.
I will share one such presentation I made and shared with my class recently. Having recognized a pattern in some students of not seeming to view the student-teacher relationship in the most positive and useful (from their standpoint) light, I took it upon myself to have a homeroom discussion explaining how it may be seen, encouraging productive dialogue and, well I am the tech teacher heading towards grammar of cinema and digital story-telling units down the road so, I saw this too, as a means of front-loading the use of visuals for effectively communicating. Take a look:
Naturally, I did not just leave the desire of teachers to help as merely self-interest and we discussed this as part of our dialogue. I used this in the slideshow to pre-empt my cynics. Wherever possible, know and anticipate your audience.
PLEA FOR HELP: How can I turn my Keynote presentations into movies I can upload without losing quality?
It was quite useful. We had the discussion I had hoped for while sitting on the floor with the presentation going behind us (setting the stage and timed by myself) as an extra, a visual to help those more visually inclined, and a reminder of where we were at in the conversation for any day-dreamers.
Why “Presentation Tao”?
Two reasons. One, I am hopelessly cheeky. Two, Taoism is reductionist. It is about cleansing and getting back to the source, reducing superficiality and being natural. Unlike Zen, which is concerned with an awakening or realization, Taoism is about returning to your true nature which is, “naturally” part of the totality to the Nature of all things that we are already a part of. Or this view is, at least, to go back to Plato:
…a likely story.
Because, after all, we all have different stories and should have different ways of telling them as opposed to coming to the realization that there is only one right way. It’s like this “bento” I recently bought at Kyoto station. It was all right, but not really to my taste. I prefer to shop farther away from the station.
Not flipped. Used for effect and ESL support.