Sunday 28 October 2012

Fluffy - A 21st Century Feline Techie!


Fluffy has at last finished his first major Slideshare web presentation, which I am delighted to share with you. It was great fun to help Fluffy with this particular project, based  on a few tools which can visually enhance your lessons and presentations..

Sunday 14 October 2012

Teach Meet International 2012 Rocked!


The 3rd Teach Meet International conference held on Saturday September 29th was a hugely successful event and I was thrilled to take part in it as a presenter.  The organizers Arjana, Bart and Sonja ensured that everything went off like a dream.

The excitement during the two-hour or so online meeting was visibly, physically and emotionally palpable!!  I felt as if I was there in person.  It was so exciting to see the names of the presenters and attendees in the Chat Box, quite a few of whom I recognised and "knew" via Twitter primarily, and other online social networking groups.

What I liked about this meeting, as in all Teachmeets, was that each presentation had to be succinct, to the point, and relevant.  No room for waffle or beating about the bush!! You can view information about all the wonderful presenters from the Teachmeet wiki here.

I learned so much in the space of a few hours from educators around the globe on really interesting topics. You can see sections of the talks on Inspired, motivated, enthused.

As a presenter, my preparation for my talk on Muzy, the fairly new visual blogging platform, took me quite a long time, as I had far too much to say!!  I had to cut out a lot of things, and keep it on target. This in itself was an exciting challenge for me.

How to condense what could easily be a 45 minute presentation into a 3 minute whirlwind introduction to the topic??

As usual I created mind maps, lists, bullet points and lots of notes.  I pulled these together and managed to get it down to just 16 slides...

 


 I believe it is a special skill, and I am not sure if I was able to convey everything in the brief time I had.  I was pleased that in the end after a LOT of practising with a 3-minute timer, I did manage to deliver my message in under 3 minutes!!  Bart's famous "Monster" Bell didn't rear its head on the screen and I escaped hearing its sound!!

I was glued to my seat for the whole event and in the end I even danced along to some lovely music with all the other presenters.  This was a first for me, and it felt very good.  In fact, I absolutely loved it!!