Put your story on the cube

When I learned about CubeCreator from the readwritethink website, I thought it might easily be used with students to make the tedious learning process more attractive.

Students can make three types of pre-designed cubes and the fourth possibility is to make their own cube.

For their first cube my students had to use the BioCube template to create the biography of a famous athlete. As you can see, they produced great cubes and enjoyed themselves in the process.

The next cube they are going to create will be MysteryCube. As for the mysteries - it's up to my students.

Student presentations in the classroom

I widely use presentations in the classroom, created both by me and my students. While PowerPoint is still the most popular tool among students, new tools and applications are getting used more and more often.

Today I had a lesson with my 18 year old students who had to prepare a presentation about a personality in the computer world.  For those who use Solutions by Oxford University Press, I can add that it was a lesson in Unit 8 about the biographies of remarkable internet personalities.

One of the tools that was used for creating the presentations was present.me. Those students who used the tool claimed that it was really easy to use but they were a little flustered by having to wait for the PowerPoint slides to be processed. For some of them it took long hours. They also realised that it matters very much what kind of a microphone you have - the in-built laptop mikes produce worse sound than the portable ones.

On the whole, they loved working with present.me because it was a more challenging tool than the ones they had been using so far and it produced more impressive and gratifying results than other tools.

Take a look at the presentation made by my student Monta.


Another tool that has gained popularity among my students is Prezi.

Below is the presentation made by Renate about one of the leading figures in the Latvian social networking world Lauris Liberts who has created frype.com. The presentation was accompanied by well-prepared oral comments which unfortunately you cannot see nor hear.

What are your favourite presentation tools and methods?