This week we are thankful for 86%

This week's Presenter's Club meeting followed a great program with a very different group, Longley Elementary from Lewiston. This school has a diverse group of students from Sudan, Africa, Morocco, and Asia - just to name a few. I had a great discussion with the teacher about the challenges that she faces in the classroom; cultural differences, non-English speaking students, wide range of academic abilities, low economic backgrounds, and non-existant parent support goups. She really enjoys bringing her students for the LabVenture! program, because it is something that they can all participate in on some level. A cultural difference that she noted was that many of her students aren't hands-on and see animals as being wild, not something that can be handled...including our X-Fish.

As a group we discussed ways that we could alter our presentation style to better engage ESL students, such as speaking slowly, shorter sentences, and simpler words.

This week we made some minimal changes to the 2hr presentation to include some more student artifacts, and discussed ways to engage teachers during LabVenture! through conversation and paritipating in the program at empty stations when we have smaller groups (testing out Lobsters was a possibility).

But we saw both of these topics; presentation changes and engaging teachers as a much bigger discussion, so they became topics for future weeks:

Presentation changes (likes/dislikes, new content, new styles, different ways of using powershow) is next week's topic of discussion (Dec 2nd during lunch).

Fostering teacher relationships will be another topic that we'll get to in December as well.

Wow...December already! Again, if you're interested, you are all more than welcome to contribute.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Welcome to the Presenters Club

Hi all...we're going to revive this blog by using it to archive our weekly Presenters Club meetings. This meeting (lunchtimes on Tuesdays) gives us a chance to reflect on what has happened during LabVenture! presentations, work together on making improvements and changes, and share articles and news.

By Blogging this it will give you a chance to see what we're up to besides hosting 2 LabVenture! programs each day. And also, if you see any topics/questions/ideas where you'd like to participate or contribute to - let us know.

Nov. 18th
Today's Topic was how to best use this time, and potential future topics.
We decided to focus on one topic per week, and to have task items to complete by the next week.
Decided on opening questions:
Any changes to the presentation? Any you would like to make?
Anything stand out from last weeks visits?
Decided on Closing question:
What will next week's topic be?
Potential future topics: how to best use the teacher kiosk, major changes to current presentation style and content, future lobster presentation, teacher talking points, interesting articles to read and share...

Next week's Topic: Teacher talking points and quick revisions to the 2hr presentation.

Stay tuned...