How about Prezi? Why not introduce interactive lectures?

Every teacher knows it - the feeling of despair after spending an hour or two preparing the perfect PowerPoint for a lesson. The number of clicks, the various ideas, the numerous attempts to make the presentation look attractive enough to draw the students' attention, be interesting enough to keep their attention, and on top of it all, have the merit of a well-organised and structured lecture hopefully resulting in the outcome known as covered content - good performance - achieved goals. And then they just don't listen. Or worse, they don't even care.

Well, how about a change? 

The decision on what kind of change to introduce may not be easy, especially if there is only one computer and a regular projector in the language classroom. Using the computer classroom might not be an option at everybody's institution for various reasons. A one-computer classroom is probably more likely. That is why computer-assisted language learning is so great. Language learning assisted by only one computer can easily be implemented in the classroom where the lecture is being presented, whereas students can cover a large segment of a computer-assisted plan on their own computers at home.

That is why the perfect change for both teacher and students would be the introduction of a completely new form of presenting. The primary focus should be on the aspect of interaction because only then the amount of time spent on the preparation of the presentation will be worth the trouble. 

For instance, students may be asked to anticipate an answer or some other type of information on an upcoming slide, or interactive games may be introduced by using action buttons. Furthermore, different types of media may be inserted in the PowerPoint presentations allowing thus the implementation of a wide variety of learning styles. Many different kinds of media can be used, including graphic images, different backgrounds, photographs, sound files, video clips, animations and text. Various online and offline pages can be hyperlinked within the presentation. All these ideas can easily transform a boring presentation into an interactive teaching tool.

This great resource How to Give Interactive Lectures sorts out some of the most important steps for creating an interactive lecture and they are summarised as follows:

1. Engage in pre-instructional planning.
2. Select engagement triggers and learning tasks for interactive segments.
3. Select and adapt from interactive lecture techniques.
4. Structure and manage the interactive class session.
5. Select mechanisms and methods for collecting, organising, and responding to feedback.

With all these points in mind, how about a new tool for presentations - Prezi. 

Many a teacher has used the option of introducing hyperlinks, embedded content, insertions, animations, etc. in PowerPoint presentations, but the effect produced by Prezi even on the very basic level is really great. Just by engaging an audience in the sense that they are following the transitions from one slide to another is enough. It is eye-catching, engaging audio-visual senses in every possible way and making the audience rationalise while following the path. It practically forces the observer to follow the map in the way it has been created. Personally, I am a great fan of introducing provocative ideas and content enhancing abstract thinking so that Prezi is a real favourite of mine as far as presentations are concerned. 

Another reason why Prezi is great apart from enabling dynamic and interactive presentations is that it is an online tool and students can access it as many times as they need. It can also be downloaded, in case the Internet is not available in the classroom, it can be converted to a Pdf file and it can be posted on a workspace or wiki.

I would like to share a Prezi that I created for my Legal English students and I must admit I use it over and over again. The aim is to practise writing and I decided to focus on the structure of a closing argument. The interactive Prezi is always presented in class, and the students are then expected to submit a written closing argument based on the ideas from the presentation. The interactive aspect is realised quite effectively by means of several interactive tricks, such as questions and answers on separate slides, a “Think-pair-share” exercise, a YouTube clip, etc. The students always participate, they ask many questions referring to possible supporting arguments and the final submissions are really good. 

Hopefully, this Prezi will be interesting and illustrative enough to provoke some teacher to consider introducing interactive presentations in their language classroom. Please follow the link to Closing argument and feel free to comment or share some of your own ideas.