“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
This year, get your language learners to present their learning in a multimedia slideshow. If this is one of their first presentations, keep it simple by providing your students with a general topic to explore, such as careers. Then give your learners the freedom to narrow their topic for their presentations (e.g., engineer or teacher).
Make sure students choose two or three areas to explore to ensure no topic is repeated. Provide students with a checklist of information to gather about the topic. For careers, students would need to find out salaries, duties, top hiring companies, needed skills, and required certifications. When your students complete their research, students should deliver an oral presentation alongside their multimedia slideshow.
Try one of ESL Library's new ready-made project-based learning modules. Your students will do a presentation as part of their group research project.
3 Presentation Forms for Language Learners
Here are three recommended multimedia slideshows tools and apps that you can introduce to your language learners as they prepare their presentations. For more ideas on how to help students develop public speaking and presentation skills, check out this post, 20+ Tips and Resources to Help Learners with Their Presentation Skills.
For language learners, shorter presentations are less intimidating. Have your learners deliver a TED Talk, Ignite, or Pecha Kucha style presentation.
TED Talks are anywhere from 3 to 23 minutes and are about innovation, passions, inventions, or incredible ideas. Get language learners to study TED Talks by presenters their age and analyze the content and delivery. After analyzing a few TED Talks, have students provide you a topic for their own TED Talk they will deliver in front of their peers. The following are links with tips, rubrics, and lesson plans to get your students started:
- 10 Inspiring Talks From TED Youth
- The TEDx Classroom Project
- Engaging Assignment: Have Students Create Their Own TED Talks
- How to Give a Good Presentation Lesson Plan
- Using TED to Develop Presentation Skills
- What Students Can Learn from Giving TEDx Talks
An Ignite is a 5 minute presentation style in which students design 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds. The idea is for students to create well designed presentations with little text. Find a lesson plan and tips here, Teaching Presentation Skills with Ignite.
A Pecha Kucha is a presentation style invented by architects Klein and Dytham in Japan. The presentation lasts 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Students design 20 slides with mostly visuals and very little text. Each slide auto advances every 20 seconds. Find lesson ideas here, Pecha Kucha in the Classroom: Tips and Strategies for Better Presentations.
Presentation Tools and Apps
Create multimedia slideshows with templates, transitions, and animations with free web tools, such as Flowvella, EduBuncee (iOS app), Sway, Google Slides (iOS/Android apps), Emaze, and Canva (iOS app). Recently, Google Slides integrated a question and answer feature to engage learners.
Slideshare, Haiku Deck (iOS app), and Slide.ly are general slide creation tools with templates and resorces to help students create visually stunning presentations.
Present.me, Prezi (iOS app), and Voicethread (iOS app) allow students to add voice and video narration to their slides.
Photopeach, students create a slide presentation with quizzes, images and add music.
Livebinders is an online web tool and free mobile app that looks like a digital school binder. Students can choose presentation mode when delivering their oral presentations. It has various tabs, so students can embed websites, pdfs, images, video, and more. Students can also edit each tab’s html to design the look of the tab. Livebinders works on multiple platforms and has an extension for students to easily collect their research from the web.
Who are your favorite presenters to motivate your language learners?
