Unit 3: Prezi Presentation

Media-infused presentations, like the Prezi I created, can help in developing disciplined and synthesizing minds in many ways.  First according to Topic B in Unit 3, there are nuances that make content from a video, a song, a lecture, a text or a podcast more or less meaningful for different learning styles. My prezi contains many examples of video, podcast, images and text that help students gather information and bring it together in order to make sense of book genres.  Offering students several different ways of accessing information and organizing it into a presentation helps them to connect with the information in different ways and allows them to develop ideas to discuss in small groups and with the whole class.  With the vast amount of content available online students will benefit from having it narrowed down and packaged neatly into a engaging presentation. This will help them focus in on the content being taught in easy to digest bits. Through these learning opportunities each student's unique learning style will be addressed and they will begin to synthesize the information by bringing it all together in a way that makes sense to them.  Media makes it easier than ever to reach all of our student's learning styles at once and create rich discussions in order to begin to build understanding.

In addition to creating whole group learning opportunities, these presentations can be used in centers to reinforce and assess students' understanding.  Projects, reflection papers and many other assignments can be linked within the presentation to have students further demonstrate their thought process and mastery of the content.  As noted in Topic C of unit 3, we need to understand that evaluating and assessing synthesis is not typically something that can be measured in a traditional form. Therefore, I would have my students work in triads using PicCollage to gather or take photos of examples of a particular genre and add text supporting why these examples qualify. Then they could present these posters to the class and discuss their work with the class to gain other perspectives.  As a culminating activity, I could also have them create a guide book, video or podcast that could be used to help us determine the genres of books we read a-loud in class.  They could accomplish this by using StoryPatch, StoryBuddy, iMovie or VoiceThread to explain the attributes of each genre they learned.  This would give me a formal assessment piece from which to judge each student's ability to synthesize the information presented.  

Below is the link to my presentation which is being used in whole group instruction and centers to reinforce the concepts taught.

Prezi Presentation

Works Cited:

Topic B: digital synthesis. Wilkes University. Web. 13 November 2013

Topic C: assessing synthesis. Wilkes University. Web. 13 November 2013