Interactive Power Points: Is that an oxymoron?

I learned pretty quickly in my teaching career that if you actually want students to engage in your power points, they have to be engaging. What I mean is, they have to be set up in a way that makes the students DO SOMETHING! Taking notes doesn't count.

In the embedded presentation below, I include links to websites, a few questions to ponder, and a short clip of a stand up comic routine about the pagans and christians. I used this in class back in my days of high school teaching and it was a big success. We used it as a precursor to Beowulf so that the students would understand the presence of so many contradictions in philosophies.

As of late, I've had to compromise a bit with the power points because my students have limited access to computers when not at school. When they are at school, so many of the teachers are using web 2.0 technologies that it can be quite difficult to get the necessary resources to make a really interactive presentation...at least by my own personal standards.

Therefore, I've also embedded an example of a power point I use in vocab instruction. The interaction comes from me. I act like a game show host and draw names out of a hat to address each of the slides because each one has them doing something with the word. In fact, the only thing they are supposed to write down from the slides is the word and definition at the end of the process. They will ultimately write and discuss much more than that, which is the goal and compromise I've made to try and make this technology work for me.

Beowulf PPT

Beowulf Prereading

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Vocabulary PPT

Chapter 4 In Context

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I hope you enjoy!