Monday, December 3, 2012

The most amazing PowerPoint ever!

During my methods class, the professor demonstrated a brief lesson on the names of animals in Spanish to illustrate methodology and use of technology. This was a pretty basic topic, but we were talking about how to introduce vocabulary to students in innovative ways. A lot of us had agreed that using a PowerPoint presentation would be a good way to accomplish this but came up with similar and not so exciting presentations.
Before that day I would have said I considered to be pretty well versed in Microsoft Office. But then I saw the PowerPoint my professor had created. She presented the vocabulary in three different ways: the image of the animal, the actual word in bold and bright colors, and the sound of the animal in a little clip. I immediately wondered, how did she do that?? She had inserted a brief clip on how the animals sound! We were all amazed, which is very funny because it was so simple! One of the activities to check knowledge at the end of the brief lesson was to simply listen to the sound of the animals and identify which one it was. I thought this would be perfect for young children, but also very fun for older students.
I realized that in that moment that there are many simple ways to make learning fun with a lot of the programs and tools that we currently use, such as PowerPoint. At the end of the lesson I approached my professor and she showed me how to find and add the little clips to the PowerPoint. I had seen videos in PowerPoint, but never little clips like that. I think they can be very useful and they appeal to auditory learners.

1 comment:

  1. I really like how your teacher did that. I am planning on being an English teacher, but I also am getting a degree in Latin, and am thinking of maybe teaching it in a private school setting. I find teaching languages to be fascinating and that is such an innovative and creative way to teach vocabulary. When I was learning Spanish in high school, we had pictures in the book that we would glance at and then go straight to the exercises, which was not very helpful. I like this method and think it would be a lot more effective.

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