Presentational
"Learners present information, concepts, and ideas to inform, explain, persuade, and narrate on a variety of topics using appropriate media and adapting to various audiences of listeners, readers, or viewers."
(World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages)
(World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages)
- Creation of messages
- One-way communication intended to facilitate interpretation by members of the other culture when no direct opportunity for active negotiation of meaning between members of the two cultures exists.
- To ensure the intended audience is successful in its interpretation, the "presenter" needs knowledge of the audience's language and culture
- Writing (messages, articles, reports), speaking (telling a story, giving a speech, describing a poster), or visually representing (video or PowerPoint)
Google Sites (Link)
Google Sites are easy-to-use and easily customizable. They are a perfect platform to display student work, and can serve as an online portfolio to showcase presentational writing (and speaking!) skills over the course of one school year or throughout a student's entire world language career.
Students can also embed other documents, images, and even video and audio in their site. For example, AP students created a recording of themselves as "newscasters" talking about a recent current event in their country. This was tied in as part of their Google Site, which served as their culminating summative assessment. |
Prezi (Link)
Prezi is a presentation tool that can be used as an alternative to Power Point or Google Slides. Instead of slides, Prezi makes use of one large canvas that allows you to pan and zoom to various parts of the canvas and emphasize the ideas presented there.
It can spin, rotate, move around, and they have a large variety of backgrounds and formats available. Prezis are now able to be edited by various people at the same time, making it easy-to-use for group projects and assignments. You are able to embed videos, links, photos, symbols, and even background music! |
Voice Thread (Link)
VoiceThread allows students to record presentational speaking while pairing it with images and other visualizations. Voicethread allows users to upload their own images and then record their own voices to describe the images. Additionally, they provide presenting tools like digital pens to enhance the presentation of the information.
Students can create photo sequences or describe infographics utilizing this technology. This can allow students of any level to perform tasks, as it is very flexible with what can be described. From novice photostories to advanced position statements on contemporary issues, students can use the user friendly interface to convey their knowledge orally to others. Additionally, after publishing their VoiceThreads, other students may add commentary or pose questions about the presentation, allowing for an interactive step after the initial presentational task. As students can save their voice threads to one account and link them elsewhere, VoiceThread lends itself easily to creating digital voice portfolios where students can review how their presentational speaking skills have evolved over the course. These can also be pulled up to show off student performance to administration and community and can be used to help document growth in presentational speaking as well. |
Storybird (Link)
Using Storybird you are able to create a picture book, poem, or long-form (chapter) book. Although you are unable to upload original artwork, you are able to select drawings, paintings, photographs and sketches that have been uploaded by artists.
Students could have to select an image and describe the scene, write a poem about it, or talk about the events leading up to the scene (or the events that took place afterwards)! In upper levels, they could also talk about what they would do if they were in the character's situation. |
Easel.ly (Link)
Easel.ly lets you create infographics easily! You are able to select pre-determined backgrounds and also develop your own from scratch.
Student can use this as early as the novice level to display their knowledge of language. Because infographics are perfectly acceptable with sentence fragments and snapshots of data, novice levels can find this to be an easy way to express more abstract knowledge. More advanced students can use the same format, adding in small summaries as their language skills evolve. Easel.ly lets you download and save the infographics easily, which makes them easy to utilize in a digital portfolio where students can collect these examples and show growth over the course of the year. |
Microsoft Photo Story (Link)
Microsoft Photo Story is software available for PCs. You are able to select photos and record voice narration, as well as include background music and transitions.
It is very user-friendly and students could narrate stories about their childhoods or a past trip they took. This could be used for presentational writing and/or speaking, depending on how much preparation the students had before recording their voices. |