CHAPTER 5 - "Making connections"

Chapter 5, “Making connections”, was an eye opener for me. I learned that as presenters we need to make the audience feel connected and belonged by having them engaged and motivated throughout the presentation. Dr. Burmark introduces many ideas, examples and tools to accomplish our goals as successful presenters.
One way to have the audience connected is to build on our students’ prior knowledge. Dr. Burmark suggests we could use PowerPoint for digital slides to show concrete pictures to the students and assess them but making it fun, like a game. Another way is to put color images of a particular historical event, divide the class into groups so students can determine the chronological sequence. We could also use PowerPoint as Digital flash cards to teach about words. I always thought PowerPoint was only to lecture by opening a new lesson. I never saw PowerPoint as this kind of tool to help make teaching easier, with this ways of using this technology it could be engaging and fun. I will try these great ideas to have the students more engaged during class time.
Presenting is not about just showing a PowerPoint and reading the slides, it’s about also making the audience participate through learning activities. For example, teacher could use 10:2 (after ten-minutes of teaching, students pause for two minutes to discuss with their partner about the subject). This practice helps the student to connect the new information to their prior knowledge and they will retain the new information.
Another activity that is suggested is “compare and contrast” by author Robert Marzano. This strategy is to identify similarities and differences. Teacher could have a wide picture slides with two different illustrations so students can identify the similarities and differences of each picture.
There are many other specific activities to help presenters in getting their audience engaged, but the one that really caught my attention is “Where everybody knows your name”. Dr. Burmark suggests teachers should learn and call their students by their names to make them feel belonged. I am the only Art teacher at my school campus, and every year I have over 140 art students. It is really complicated for me to learn every single name by memory. For some reason my brain can remember the faces, the art style of the students, and their behavior but not the names. When I call them I read from my sitting chart and the students get excited saying “Miss you know my name”, I smile, but they don’t know I’m actually reading it from my sitting chart. It is sad, but true and after reading this chapter I learned the importance of calling a student by their names. It makes them feel important, and belonged in the classroom. I have determined myself to use Dr. Burmark suggestions in learning my student’s names. This week I will take pictures of all my students, label them with their names and their hobbies to get to know them better. I love the idea of Activity 5.6, in using Photo Expansion to assign students in creating posters of them and at the same time to help the teacher learn about them.
In this chapter, Dr. Burmark also gives tips on how to use Wordle within our activities. She also suggests us to use humor to connect with the audience. Dr. Burmark motivates us to be persistent all the time, even when we think the students are not retaining our teaching. We need to keep on using these tools because it will make it a lot easier later. "Presenting with these tools will be similar to Annie Sullivan teaching the blind and deaf Helen Keller, like a miracle worker". (Burmark, p. 92)

Burmark, L. (2011). They snooze you lose: The educator’s guide to successful presentations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.