If I Tell You to Remember THIS

If the first four slides of your PowerPoint smell like strawberries, then that fifth slide better smell like bacon.Yesterday, during the virtual workshop “How to Make Presentations Memorable”, Carmen Simon of Rexi Media referred to this as the 5th element. Changing the stimulus allows you to control what your audience remembers:

Simon says that the “secret balance to making anything more memorable” is using recognition and surprise. For example, present your audience with something they are familiar with, such as an apple, and force them to reconsider it:

By deviating from what people expect, we wake up the brain, force it to make new connections and think about things in novel ways. Simon spoke of three phases for designing presentations:

1. Change the stimulus: you can make anything noticeable by interrupting consistency.
   Switch from graphics to text, or text to graphics. Every third to fifth slide should be different from the previous ones.
2. Add vanity/ytinav. Most people have desire for social approval. Are you in the know?
3. Build your MQ (metaphor quotient) . Transform and/or add to your audience’s understanding of a concept.
   
   

   

   http://wakefelderman.blogspot.ca/

   
   

Think about this: how much of this blog post will you remember? Which things will you remember? Or, further, which blog posts from On the Same Page do you remember and why?

Finally, Simon suggests doing whatever you can to keep information alive. Choose images and text that have a high arousal factor and produce feelings of awe, excitement, amusement; anger; anxiety, instead of contentment or sadness. How did Simon do this? By having us participate in timed challenges and asking us to share our work; by making us do jumping jacks; by showing us a video of an iPad being smashed to bits and put into a blender.

I end with a challenge: In the comment box below, share your own thoughts on what the camel and martinis could be a metaphor for. No, you can't write "Don't drink and ride a camel." That one is already taken.

English Equivalency Exam Review Retreat

Last Thursday, March 21, 2013, English Language Arts faculty reviewing equivalency exams participated in a retreat at SAIT's Heritage Hall.  No, not a retreat from reviewing exams, but rather a temporary release from instruction to give review the needed attention and time required.

As a group, we examined items and readings previously marked by the larger group as needing revision.  Many items required changes in wording.  Some items needed distractor revisions as the best choice may not be clear. Three of the readings were considered too long, at over 150 lines, and will need to be shortened, using a preamble.  Footnotes will be added to several readings to handle complex vocabulary not attainable through context clues.

Next, we examined the imbalances on the blueprint for both forms of the ENG0302 equivalency exams to determine what questions would need to be revised, dropped and added.  For moves requiring changes in difficulty, from A to B to C, items could be revised.  For moves requiring changes in outcome, from 1 to 2, items would likely to be dropped and new items added, with these new items preferably attached to the same reading.  Questions will need to be added to provide outcome 3 questions for both forms.

Lastly, we  examined item sets to see if we needed to replace any to achieve balance on the blueprint.  We removed two readings and their accompanying items.  The group established that readings were directly related to texts covered in the curriculum should not be used on equivalency exams to maintain fairness.  Form B will require a functional writing reading.

In the end, the group came up with a revision plan, to be published at foundationalcurriculum.com in the coming week.  Revision tasks will be shared with the larger group of English Language Arts faculty.  More importantly, we came away as a new team.  Thanks to Maureen Stewart for setting up the event and providing guidance for the group during review.  Thanks to Patricia Pryce, Susan Lemmer, Tasha Nott, Meghan Clayton, Murray Ronaghan and Jennefer Rousseau for taking the time to review. Next time, I promise to bring patio chairs.

Successful Writing Collection for WriteForward - Maureen Stewart

      As many of you know, THE CEFL is developing a follow up tool to Read Forward. It is a writing assessment tool for adult literacy learners called WriteForward. This is a multi-year project and we are currently in Phase II, the framework development phase. As part of the project, the WriteForward team wants input from all stakeholders, including learners. One way we incorporated learners was the Writing Collection.

     In February, the WriteForward team conducted the Writing Collection at the college and with literacy partners across Canada. The purpose was to learn from ELL, Ac Prep, High School and career learners what they can write and what they want to be able to write. I did mini-presentations to five English Language Learning literacy classes, five Ac Prep classes and three high school classes. A very big thank you to the CEFL instructors who participated! David Kemp, Stephanie Baier-Scott, Patricia Pryce, Lorna Houck, Mary Smith, and Ann Hanna all graciously allowed me to come to their classes for presentations and collection of samples. We also invited our Advisory Committee to participate in the Writing Collection with their learners, and Scott Henwood invited his online learners to participate as well.

     We posted a video on YouTube for the online learners and anyone else who was interested. The samples and information we received were interesting and diverse. We received everything from poetry to shopping lists to essays. The learners provided us with many excellent examples of writing they do at home, work and in their community. We have classified the contributions into home, work and community, and we will further classify them into skills. The results from the classifications will help to guide us in developing the framework for WriteForward, as well as item writing when we begin to create the tests.

     If you are interested in learning more about WriteForward, feel free to contact either Maureen Stewart or Deanna Jager for more information, or visit our website writeforward.ca Thanks again to the instructors for their support of the project and the Writing Collection!