Google Presentations

Presentations by Google is a great resource for many of the same reasons as Docs.  It is easy to use, can be shared, collaborated, and it is free!  All of which make it ideal for the classroom.  Children from a very young age could make a presentation without difficulty.  Which is important in fulfilling the requirements of the Common Core.

Teaching communication skills is crucial in helping a child succeed.  Giving children tools to make an exciting presentation can inspire confidence in his knowledge of the subject at hand.  Preparing a great presentations in early grades will help students to begin developing and building their skills each year.  Getting them ready for a life outside of school.

The Common Core State Standards for Speaking and Listening require students to have an extensive set of skills in presenting information.  It states, "Students must learn to work together, express and listen carefully to ideas, integrate information from oral, visual, quantitative, and media sources, evaluate what they hear, use media and visual displays strategically to help achieve communicative purposes, and adapt speech to context and task."  Presentations has tools to help in all these areas.  The collaboration feature allows students to work together, requiring them to express and listen to ideas of their partners.  Being an Internet-based program, it already has access to information that can be added to their presentation with a quick search and click of a button.  Whether it is images, videos, animation, graphs, tables or anything else that could help tell their story, it can be added easily.  Presentation also allows them to share their work with other students, teachers or even their parents.

Making a presentation helps students to learn how to organize information and make it flow smoothly to the audience.  The audience may be a fellow student in the early stages, but eventually it will be a potential employer.  Teachers not only have the responsibility to teach a subject, but to use technology to enhance the learning opportunity and meet the standards.

The standards increase in complexity over the span of a student's education, leading up to the creation of "living presentations."  This requires all the components to accumulated into a larger presentation.  It is interactive with teachers, peers and professionals in the field.  The Common Core goal is to prepare students to create work that matters and that can contribute to the knowledge base of the topic. 

Here is a simple presentation I did for learning ABCs:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1D1JXphUwBv4iBZJIGNoDIrUMMLBqX8AIsP3q3Dc7yOE/present?ueb=true#slide=id.p