Thelia A. Lisle

Debbie as Coach (Blue) to Thelia (Red)

Lesson Background: My mentee teacher has two lessons she wants to use PowerPoint with. The schools who are sending and/or receiving distance learning in Spanish in the state have been trying to do group presentations to each other this year. So far her classes have just watched and participated silently. She has been asked to have her class make a presentation to the group.
If I understand this, you are say that in these lessons are not interactive, (meaning the class is not able to communicate with the other school/s). No, they will be presenting to the other schools.

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This will be using technology to present a lesson, but also transmitting it over the ITV equipment. We'll need to audio considerations as well as video (or graphic) considerations too.
I have not used ITV equipment before, so will her class have to consider timing like lag-time between actual speaking and transmitting?Yes, possibly. The more participants involved, the more lag-time will be a factor.l

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She actually has two lessons she needs to create. One will be associated with their "Day of the Dead" (Dia de Los Muertos) projects. Each student makes an alter for someone who has died. Her classes will be making those projects and they need a way to make a presentation of them for the students at the remote sites. (across the ITV equipment).

We talked about problems associated with panning the cameras around too much-trying to zoom in and out with live camera connections. That would be difficult to do and would also cause too much breaking up of the ITV feed. Movement causes the video to appear to be choppy or blocky to the receiving end. I think I will suggest she use a digital camera and take good pictures of each project ahead of time. She could then either show them on the document camera or make a PPT out of them and have her students narrate live for the receiving schools what each project represents. They could rehearse that ahead of time-her students-before the live connection so that they are familiar with the parts they are responsible for during the live connection.

The other situation is that she is a part of a state-wide DL Spanish initiative project who are taking turns making presentations on assigned topics to the rest of the state-wide participants. Her assignment is for her students to research and make a presentation to explain how Cortez was able to defeat the Aztecs with so few men?

Have you considered a format that can accommodate participants across the state? The participants across the state will only be viewing, so I'm thinking they can do a PPT or just use still images and the document camera. They will have to do collaborative research to find information and gather images. Then individual students will be responsible for "talking" - presenting the information orally as the DL students look at the picture on the slide or on the doc cam. Are there certain technologies that lend themselves to DL? Yes, as long as they're not having PC issues, the PPT should work well. The Doc cam is like an overhead, except it transmits the image across the DL channels to all participants at once- they are all looking at the same picture and hearing the same audio (student's voices).Is this live or what is the time frame like? Yes, it will be delivered real-time-live. They will also be on a schedule, so they will have to be ready to present at their appointed time. It's like a video workshop and they are assigned a time-slot and given a certain allotted time to get their presentation made.

Thelia as Coach (Blue) to Debbie (Red)

Lesson Background: Mrs. White's 9th grade English classes are working on TAKS Test Strategies. She would like for them to create an interactive game that would review these strategies. What specific objectives does she want to focus on? Will she assign specific TAKS strategies to individual students? Will they combine those into one game, or multiple? Will she divide the strategies into categories and assign groups to work on each category?

We have talked about a couple of mediums, a PowerPoint presentations and web-pages. The idea is for the students to plan and create the game. Possible problem would be the student learning the software in order to create their project. I see this as a group assignment with each member having a role/responsibility. The final project would be presented other groups for a critique. Her focus will not be on teaching the medium, so I suggest she use PPT because (a) some students will already have a basic idea of how to use it and (b) it's very user-friendly-they can figure it out. In fact, you could construct a template for her of a Jeopardy game and the students would come up with their categories and strategies and just input the Q's & A's.

Another lesson Mrs. White's class has been working with includes the lyrics of "We Didn't Start the Fire." The class has been learning about the people mentioned in the song and the struggles they faced. This could be a good research project that culminates in either a report or a slide presentation.
I thought that it would be interesting for the students to research a person from the song. She may need to narrow the focus for them though-biographical research can be very broad.
Then students create a magazine Q&A interview style article and a magazine cover of the celebrity. Is she going to have to teach the mechanics of news-style journalism? (who,what,when,where,how). Need to narrow the lesson objectives down.

These are the two ideas that I had.

Decide which one will fit in better with Mrs. White's class objectives. Then focus on executing the details of that lesson.