At Cal State I have attended many excellent professional development sessions. I used to work for a technology grant and as part of our activities we provided professional development workshops for our College of Education faculty. I believe that many of these sessions were great examples of a great professional development experience. The presenters were experts in the different topics we covered and allowed for hands on experience in every workshop. The pace of the presentation always allowed them to answer questions from the audience and not exceed the time allowed. Every workshop concluded with a Q&A section to make sure that the attendees understood the concepts and can applied them to their courses. I believe that these workshops were an excellent example because of the experience of the presenters, mostly comprised of professional presenters from companies working with the grant, CSUSB faculty, and professional development staff at the department of academic computing and media. Also, the topics were always individualized to the topic of integrating technology in the classroom. Other characteristics were that the workshops were short, not more than two hours, and that each one distributed and collected evaluation forms. Evaluations are important in PD because they can be used to improve your presentations.
Recently I attended a session that could be considered a poor example. This I think is mainly due to the inexperience of the presenter. The presenter is very knowledgeable about the topic, but lacks the overall experience on how to address the many parts of the presentation. One example is that his presentation was constantly stopped to answer questions from the audience. It is important to answer questions, but it is also very disruptive for the rest of the audience. Also, this training covered the use of 3 to 4 technology tools over a period of 1 hour and a half, and this made the pace of the workshop go very fast and caused confusion with the audience. This in my opinion was a poor experience because an the presenter did not include an evaluation, and without this it is very difficult to improve the training
Project 3
Activity Log
Listened to podcast and posted my response
Posted project 3
4 comments:
Edgar,
Your post highlights one of the classic fallacies, that is, assuming that qualification as an SME equals qaulification as a presenter or trainer. Of course this knife cuts both ways and Jennie's post regarding the CUE conference alludes to it; where good teachers gave poor presentations because their product knowledge was lacking or too narrow, focusing only own their needs.
Hi Edgar,
It was funny to see that what you talked about was close to what I was saying and then Brain pointed it out about what I said about CUE. It all comes down to the trainer for sure. Great post.
Makes you think about what are "good" presentation skills? Can anyone be a good presenter with practice? How often do presenters truly seek feedback?
Your blog made think of questions like this, good points!
Thank you for the qualities of a "great presentation". It is true that people need experience to be great presenters, but it helps to know some of the tips beforehand..
Post a Comment