Powerful PowerPoints

I rather enjoyed this assignment, especially since it resulted in something I can actually use in my classroom. Mapping is a topic that I have been dreading teaching; it should be something fun to teach first graders, but somehow last year it was torture.  I think we were supposed to cover it earlier in the year, but the rest of my team and I opted to push it to the fourth quarter because no one was really feeling the love.  I will use this PowerPoint to introduce it and I am actually looking forward to doing that next week.  It covers that main SOL points required and I may make another one to flesh out the unit.

I noticed that my link downloaded a copy of my presentation, but other people's links opened it in DropBox, so I am trying this link as well to see if it opens in DropBox.

I have made PowerPoints before and must confess that I often fell victim to the bullet-ization that General McMaster derided in the article.  It seemed that if bullets were built in, I should use them.  If I could make them float, flash, flicker, etc. then I should do so.  And I did.  Never again.  That's not to say this PowerPoint is perfect, but I did make sure the pictures did the talking and the text was kept to a minimum.  I took some things out that I may add back in after trying it live, but I think most of those were just reminders to me that the slide could be used for discussion.  As I get used to the presentation, I will probably be able to remember that on my own.  I went back to the Thirst example several times and it was definitely test driven, so I certainly don't feel that text is something that needs to be eliminated entirely.  That would not have been as powerful without the words and pictures working together.

Placing something in the public folder of DropBox was completely new to me.  I have used DropBox for years at home to enable me to bounce between laptops and desktops with ease.  I just started using it for work this year when my thumb drive died.  I did not even know there was a Public folder.  Very handy for sharing.

iste standards: I think this assignment goes along well with standard 2 -design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments.  This is certainly something that can be easily shared with a class, but also it can be shared with parents.  I have a student out of the country right now and his parents do not want him to fall behind.  I could easily post a link to this on my school web page so that they could stay in touch with what we are doing in the classroom.  I think standard 5 is also addressed because I plan to share this PowerPoint with my team members.  We are all constantly on the lookout for tools to use to introduce or deepen understanding of content.  I am sure some of them would be able to easily incorporate this into their introduction to mapping.