Letting Your Students Star In Your Presentation

By: Tina Correa-Barron, SLP (speech-language pathologist)

Reading time: 2 minutes

As a follow up to my blog post about Using PowerPoint to Support Language Learning, I wanted to give an example of how I have incorporated my students into class interactive PowerPoint presentations. (For privacy purposes, I have only included one child in the example PowerPoint file I’m sharing; my daughter.) I have used this type of interactive PowerPoint presentation many times during the Word of the Week activity in my class this year. This is only one example of many other ways to incorporate students into interactive PowerPoint presentations, and it is a method with which I have had success.

The PowerPoint lesson opens with a slide introducing the activity (e.g., bubbles) to the students. Subsequent slides have pictures of the students demonstrating the activity and provide rudimentary language instruction. This format allows for adaptation to a variety of activities, such as blowing bubbles, jumping on a trampoline, or inflating a balloon. These interactive PowerPoint lessons can be easily modified to match the number of slides to the students in the class. Students really enjoy seeing the faces of themselves and other students on the projector screen, as well as watching each other take their turn going up to the front of the class. I have found this a great way to keep students engaged in action and to model turn taking as they pass the activity item (e.g., the bubbles) to each other while attending to who came before and after them in the activity. It’s a great way to practice “your turn” and “my turn” sequencings. The activity allows for “call and response” formative learning, where there is a question posed with a repeated phrase that only changes one part to help students easily put words into sentences.

I am sharing with you a short example of the interactive PowerPoint format I use: Whose turn is it to blow bubbles? (My Turn)

Feel free to download and adapt it for use in your classroom. [Please note: this is an MS PowerPoint (pptx) file; you need MS PowerPoint to read/modify it.]