Week 4 Reflection

I decided to join SlideShare for my online community building. SlideShare appealed to me because I often use Prezi to present information in class. It is a taxing task to always create digital presentations, so often I do a simple Google search for Prezi’s relating to a given topic. I then find Prezi’s that follow the structure I like, and may or may not have information similar to what I desire to present to my class. I make a copy of the presentation and then begin to edit the content to fit my needs. SlideShare acts as an additional resource for finding presentations related to my subject area as well.

I made my first attempt at using SlideShare this past week. I’m currently teaching theme and using the five elements of plot structure to help students analyze theme. I began searching on SlideShare and attempted to find a variety of resources from presentations to videos to documents. I found the process somewhat frusturating. While I think SlideShare is a great resource it was created not only the education profession, but for business, marketing, arts and a plethora of other realms. While I can select education as a filter it doesn’t allow me to narrow my search for theme within the education filter (or at least that was my experience). Thus, narrowing down SlideShares that are actually beneficial to the specifics of what I am teaching was a challenge. Also, I think there are other presentation tools that are more appealing, interactive, and engaging. While SlideShare is effective I'm not sure it is the best fit for me.

What I did find beneficial in becoming a member of SlideShare is that in the browsing process I found myself exposed to a wide range of new ideas and teaching resources. I think my original thought was that SlideShare would act as a resource in terms of classroom lesson materials; however, I found that this was actually helpful in that there are tons of slides posted to help teachers become better teachers. One in particular that interested me was a presentation on closing the race gap. Conclusions were made that helped me contextualize how I might achieve this in my own classroom.