Last Friday, Emily and I did the Data Analysis/Excel presentation. To be honest this was not one of my better presentations. I guess the strength of our presentation was the fact that we were able to keep pushing through our presentation regardless of how many mistakes were made throughout our talk. Our weaknesses were we were not as prepared as we thought. Emily and I practiced for a few days prior to our presentation. We divided up the slides we felt that we were most confident on and then reviewed how to do the excel portion. I have used excel before and I thought it would be a piece of cake to be able to walk the rest of the class through it. The reality was I needed to practice how to teach it more. I also need to use the slides since they are a great tool in explaining how to use excel. I know that I need to not assume that my audience knows what I am talking about. Eric gave us a great tip: Pretend that there are 5 students who missed the carbon cycle lecture and try to catch them up to speed in 5 minutes. I know that will be a challenge for me but I am up to the task. I have already done a presentation of the data analysis with my mother and brother and it was much smoother than when I presented on Friday. Another challenge we have is to do the data analysis presentation without a partner. I like the idea of having a partner since there is a lot to do for this presentation. However, we will still have help the day we are teaching the highschool students anyway.
Mariah and Luke did their presentation first and their presentation was not as disastrous as Emily and I. They divided their presentation like we did but theirs was definitely smoother. They were able to explain the slides and walk us through excel without many corrections. We all have improvements to make but I’m confident we will all improve on our excel skills.
Simon Mills article “Who’s A Smartie??” gave me more insight on how to engage the students in using excel.Mills used an interactive white boards which helped him involve his students in making graphs and using excel. One point that stood out to me was making a connection with the activity and the students. I realized that I have to know the data analysis/excel as thoroughly as possible and also be interested in what I am presenting. When I show interest then the students will not feel that what I am saying is boring.
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As I wrote on Emily’s blog, I think both our groups will do better at our actual presentations, now that we have run through them once. We just had a little trouble “gelling” with our partners, and performing the teachings of Excel and explanations is a smooth manner. Also, you article seems to be similar to the one I chose, which dealt with encouraging college faculty that teach statistics to use a kind of cohesive, small-group oriented teaching style in order to keep the students’ attention. It’s just not an easy subject to teach and make interesting I guess!
Being able to push through to the end is a great skill. I’m confident that we will all do fine come time to present. This excel stuff is tricky. You make a good point about assuming some of the students have missed the previous classes. As long as we reiterate basic concepts the students shouldn’t have any issues with Excel. Great job!
I’m glad that you mentioned how your enthusiasm for a subject can be contagious. I had forgotten this, and might have been a debby downer teaching a tedious, boring topic. In turn, sloughing through material would have defeated the purpose of our entire project with the students.
I wouldn’t call it a disaster! you guys were able to work through it, you just hit some speed bumps along the way. As you become more comfortable with the content, exercise, and explanations I would expect you will be able to run through things more smoothly. Thanks for your post.
E