One of my most favourite professional development books is Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. He has a Presentation Zen website with plenty of information and tips too if you can’t quite get your hands on the book – A 2nd Edition copy has just been released too – Voices that Matter. I highly recommend that you do purchase your own copy of the book and I highly recommend that you give Presentation Zen a try in your classroom.
Currently I use Presentation Zen for PD sessions with faculty as much as I can, but when I was in the classroom I used Presentation Zen Keynotes for Readers and Writers Workshop. The result in the classroom was (I think) better conversations, shorter mini-lessons and increased motivation and inspiration – especially for writing.
Recently at the JIS Technology Learning Institute, the Presentation Zen- Introduction session I ran, was very popular. Below I’ve included the Keynote (uploaded to SlideShare) to introduce the basics of Presentation Zen. After the basics, we looked at an actual Readers Workshop keynote that I’d used in the past, then I asked the session participants to begin work on their own Presentation Zen keynote. It was a great way to not only introduce the basics of keynote, but encouraged a really good conversation about Creative Commons and copyright, which a lot of schools are struggling with.
Do you use PresentationZen? What ways do you use it?
