I’ve just completed my first PowerPoint presentation for my students in Italy. I made it about Washington DC, and for several reasons:

Apparently students in Italy learn about Washington DC so it should be at least a little familiar from their lessons. It’s our nation’s capital, so it’s obviously important. I wanted to include information on memorials and monuments they might not be familiar with. I’ve lived here for a few years now, so it’s pretty easy to come up with stuff to include.

Now, in an effort of full disclosure – I hate PowerPoints. Really. Hate them. Every time I’ve had to suffer through one it has been pure torture. I once had a professor that ran nearly his entire class off of PowerPoint presentations, reading them verbatim throughout the lesson.

They’re boring, and long, and lame and….very useful for my current purposes. What better way to convey information to a large group of students complete with pictures and providing the ability to follow along on their own? This way they can see the words I’m saying and process them in their own minds. The pictures not only depict the monument or memorial being discussed, but also provide context – which will hopefully aid in comprehension.

So, I must admit I have to change my tune about these PowerPoints. I once had an instructor who mentioned that anytime one maintains a strong, vehement opinion about something – it’s surprising how they change their tune when they start discovering exceptions to it.

In any case, I will be creating more presentations on various topics for my students to watch and participate with. I’m trying to incorporate pictures with small descriptive paragraphs. Then at the end I’ve added an click-animated fill in the blank to quiz them on certain words from the presentation. It ends with a collection of vocabulary words featured in the presentation on the final slide.

I anticipate they will either be extremely useful or totally worthless – we’ll see!

One thing I didn’t anticipate is how time consuming these presentations are. Between collecting the data, formatting it, finding relevant, copyright-free pictures, organizing it logically, animating the quiz slides and compiling the vocabulary – one presentation easily takes a couple hours. Heck, maybe I should sell these puppies when I’m done with them! I know I’d be willing to throw down a few dollars to avoid all this work.

I was walking by a game store today when I noticed a rack filled with Bananagrams. Bananagrams have been around for a few years and are basically scrabble without the board. I was thinking they might be useful for helping the students with their vocabulary. They have two other versions that use letters for different styles of games – one is suited and one is like dominos – called Appletters and Pairs in Pears. They’re pretty steep at $15 dollars each, but each game is enough for 8 players and I think they might really be useful. Plus, I can leave them there as a memento of my time spent in the classroom. While I was in the game store I started talking to one of the owners whose brother has recently moved to Japan to teach English with his fiancé. She mentioned a game called Dixit.It’s a game that involves using cards devoid of language which require one to describe its image to the other players. While taking my TEFL Certification classes I’ve seen similar games described, in which two people each have a picture, and the other person must figure out what the picture is solely through the first person’s description of it. It really makes the learners use as much of the learned language as possible. It’s $35, but I also think it might really be worth it for creating lesson diversity in the classroom. Or maybe I can just bring a bunch of pictures of things and have people describe them?

I always knew teaching was difficult, it’s just so surprising to finally be on the planning side of it – and seeing how difficult and time consuming it really is! And I’m only teaching one small subject!

I know that without a doubt, though, I will learn and grow throughout this experience no matter what happens – which is precisely what I’ve been looking for.