ONLINE PRESENTATION STRATEGIES

by Richard White

2013-11-27

I blame it on the fact that I’m teaching a new course.

As I’m teaching AP Computer Science, and developing curriculum, assignments, and lessons for that class, and trying to figure out what works—and what doesn’t—there are lots of mid-course adjustments that I make. Not every assignment needs to be perfect, perhaps, but if I don’t get done addressing all the concerns in that one lesson, it’s hard to have very high expectations for the work that students will do that evening.

And in an AP course, time needs to be used wisely. I can’t afford to be expanding units when there’s a certain amount of material that must be covered by the end of the year.

Fortunately I’ve been able to leverage YouTube and GoToMeeting videoconferencing software to take up some of the slack while I get my act together. A 3-minute follow-up to a lesson, emailed to students, can help to proactively clear up a lot of confusion. Likewise, being available for online office hours, during which students can share their screens with me and we can debug their programs… that’s invaluable.

And although I’ve usually worked on the computer in the past, with a voiceover that describes what I’m doing, it’s often useful to “do a Khan” (as in Sal Khan, of Khan Academy), and just write some stuff out. I don’t have any evidence to back me up here, but my gut says that there’s an enormous cognitive benefit to developing things progressively, and by hand.

Here’s an example of a combination of drawing and computer analysis, done not for the AP Comp Sci class but in preparation for an Hour of Code unit that I’ll be using with some students. See what you think:

Do you see any advantage to demonstrating things in long form, as opposed to doing voiceovers with slides or computer displays?

More on the Hour of Code in a future post…