Educator, Thinker, Consultant

Month: June 2025

Bad Presentation Habits

I’m currently taking a class for certification renewal. One of the assignments is to create a Digital Learning A-Z guide.

“Your goal is to create a digital guide of course learning of
Federal and Maine School Law. This would be an A-Z guide that demonstrates your thorough understanding of what you have learned in this class with reading, handouts, discussion, etc.”

“As you develop your ideas and pull this project together,
imagine you would be presenting this A-Z guide to peers for a professional workshop in a power point fashion for a
training.”
Specifics to include:

  • Icebreaker activity at the beginning.
  • In the middle, an interactive component, with a brief game or role play experience.
  • Embed one video
  • Incorporate font size that is conductive to an audience.

This just screams bad presentation skills. Creating a PowerPoint presentation is going to end up with tons of words on each slide. I regularly watch presentations that are really speaker notes. I see presentations with literally paragraphs of text.

This is not how I give presentations. I generally use an image to help ground what I’m talking about. In some instances, I use a limited number of words (usually three unless names are involved).

I want to pass the class. I also kind of want to just put all the information into the Speaker Notes section, add a relevant image, and explain that this is how I present information.

Twine & Markdown

I’m working on my Fall ACTEM presentation. The presentation is on “Choose Your Own Adventure: Create An Adventure for Your Students”. Specifically, how you can create these for students. Or, better yet, how students can create these.

While working in Twine (I wrote about Twine previously), I wrote some things in Markdown. Since Twine doesn’t have a “viewer” window, pure text is what you see. I didn’t really expect Twine to display the markdown correctly, I was just entering it as a to way to remind myself to go back and format the text.

However, I clicked the “Test From Here” button, essentially a “preview” button, and lo and behold, Twine does display markdown as proper HTML.

Now, I know that I can use Twine while writing in Markdown. Yea!

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