I'm sure this will be one of many post on the ISTE Keynote. Jean-Francois Rischard is the former Vice-President of the World Bank. He was there to offer is perspective on 21st Century Global Education Systems. That is all I know about what happened last night. There was little room in the Auditorium, so I was with some tweeps at the Bloggers Lounge getting ready to Tweet amazing insight from the Keynote. None came. What we all saw was a series of Power Point slides that were filled with text and the same cartoon earth Gif over and over again. The crowd went wild. Not because we loved it, but because we all thought this was a joke. This is ISTE! We are pumped to get rolling and here a motivational and dynamic speaker tell us about the power of technology in education and we got a series of slides.
Shame on ISTE for not checking the Power Point before hand. Heck, even I glance through a student's presentation before I let them go in front of a class. The sad part is that he probably had an amazing point, but none of us could see it. We were distracted by the poor presentation skills. I tweeted, "I have failed student's for projects better than this." and I wasn't kidding. At one point, he had a list of 10 points on a slide that were filled with text and more text. People in the first few rows sent tweets to us asking if we could read them because they could on the jumbotron!
The one thing everyone should walk away with is this, know your audience. We are a bunch of techie teachers looking to be inspired. We ended up with a good laugh, but in a sad way. If you want some pics of the power point slides to see what I'm talking about, drop me a tweet and I will send them out. The bar was set low with that opening Keynote, so the rest of ISTE is going to be stellar. Right.
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ReplyDeletePoor powerpoint, powerful message.
ReplyDeleteThis always seems to be the case with tech conferences and education. Even if the message was great, the modeling of poor technology in delivering that message will give many educators a false sense of edtech integration. It's funny that I didn't accept that kind of presentation from 6th graders several years ago. I fear we are in trouble!
ReplyDeleteNumber one rule of presenting is know your audience! It is amazing how often this rule is ignored. What a shame that the speaker wasn't able to make his point more clearly. He obviously had an large audience waiting to hear what he had to say.
ReplyDelete