Presentations
Posted by cvetka on 9 September, 2009
Giuliana Perco
Class presentations are a crucial part of any language course, since they offer the students the opportunity to present a topic that interests them and to do so by using the foreign language that they are studying. Very often, such presentations take the form of Powerpoint slide-shows about some cultural aspect of the country where the target language is spoken; some other times they might be creative role-playing scenes of various nature.
In the first case, after a couple of semesters, for many language teachers this translates in viewing over and over (and over!) the same presentation on the same trite and popular topics. For instance, Italian teachers are subjected to endless blurring presentations on Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, food, opera, and so on. Sometimes they cringe, when for instance students translate into Italian terms that were not supposed to be translated at all (”Signora Farfalla” for “Madame Butterfly”, for instance: I’m not making this up, it really happened in one of my classes).
Personally, I prefer the second kind of class presentations, in which students are asked to use their creativity, rather than being forced to pass inconsequential information that they copied from wikipedia to their peers, who, on the other hand, get extremely bored watching such presentations.
I did not want my students to be bored, moreover, I did not want them to waste time looking up superficial details about some great Italian person from the past just to regurgitate it later in bad Italian. Instead, I wanted them to have fun, to discover new things, to play with the language, and to learn from their work. I also wanted them to use SL. Of course, this also meant that their presentations involved a lot of work on their part (!)
Because of this, I wanted to help them to accomplish their task from the technological point of view. The guidelines for the presentation that I prepared were very specific, but let students quite free in their choice of topic, provided that it had something to do with the idea of virtual environments. The presentation was also broken down into several smaller tasks, so that I could follow their work step by step and help them, in case of need.
The first step was of course choosing a topic. In the guidelines, I had given them some ideas, but I had also told them that those were only tips and that they could choose something else.
After choosing their topics, my students had to write an annotated outline of their project, which I read and approved while giving suggestions on how to structure the final presentation. A couple of weeks later, they had to turn in a “script” for their presentation, so that I had a better idea of what they were doing and could correct the grammar and give tips on the vocabulary to use. The last thing they had to do before the actual presentation was to write a notecard briefly introducing their presentation in Italian and giving landmarks to places that we would all be visiting during the presentation itself.
In the end, the big days arrived. Actually, I ended up postponing the presentations to the very last possible moment, in order to give students more time to complete the task. Two students decided to go first and to present during the last Friday class, the rest presented on Sunday night, when we met in SL for a very long session (a bit over two straight hours).
Among my initial tips for the presentation, I had suggested “virtual tourism”: with this I meant a “trip” to a sim that had something to do with some part of Italian culture and/or history. The two students who decided to present on Friday had been impressed by the virtual Sistine Chapel and decided to focus their presentation on it, talking also about the significance that, in their opinion, the virtual reconstruction in SL had for a student of Italian. They presentation was interesting and engaging and had all our avatars flying up towards the ceiling of the Chapel at one point or another. They also had found interesting information on the virtual replica made at Vassar College sim.
Gabi’s and Meghan’s notecard on the virtual Sistine Chapel
On Sunday, we had a tour de force session and listened to/watched three very different and equally interesting presentations. The first was also the longest. Chiara and Isabella initially wanted to make a series of interviews to native speakers in the Florence sim. When I told them that every time I had visited the area I had only met Spanish speaking avatars, they were very disappointed, but I was thrilled by their idea: they wanted to interview a series of Italian avatars for their presentation; this meant that my assignment on interviews with native speakers had been even better received than I had thought.
In the end, they decided to re-visit Siena, one of the very first sim we had visited together. I suggested to them to look up the story of the Palio, to compare the virtual Siena with pictures of the real one, and so on. What they did was a bit different, but it made me very proud. I guess that, emboldened by their positive experience when interviewing Italian avatars for the previous assignment, once they got on the Siena sim, they basically began to talk in Italian to the avatars they met. In this way, they encountered a community of Italian avatars who role-play in Siena. I am not into role-playing myself and I am therefore very ignorant in this respect, but I was soon to learn quite a bit about it.
Chiara and Isabella politely asked permission to bring our group to virtual Siena for their presentation to the owners of the sim. The group owning the virtual land uses it to role play and all of its members were very extremely kind to us. Not only did they welcome us to their sim, but, after the presentation, they brought us to a long tour of the sim, explaining their role-playing activity. The tour was perhaps a bit too long and involved also climbings spiral staircases and running through winding tunnels (I have always had huge difficulties moving in restricted spaces in SL), but what thrilled me was the ability that my students had shown in making friendship with Italian native speakers by using the voice chatand speaking only in Italian. I was proud of them!
The other two students both decided to work on their presentation individually and not with a classmate. They also decided to put their own personal interests/passions at the centre of their presentation in SL. Thus Karl, led by his passion for soccer, set on a quest for a virtual soccer stadium in SL. He eventually managed not only to find one, but also to speak with the owner of the land, a soccer fan herself. His presentation was on the culture of soccer in SL, which, to my surprise, turned out to be quite interesting.
Snapshots above are courtesy of Karl Mavinelli
The final presentation was different. Colomba first explored and then brought us to islands focusing on science, especially medicine, biology and geology, fields in which he was interested. He found them all by himself, without my help, I should add. They were all extremely fascinating. Moreover, his presentation was engaged and enthusiastic, especially when he brought us to visit a virtual eco-biological experiment at Second Nature 3 and an “astrobiologic” sim at Living in the Universe. Both were excellent sites that, however, unfortunately do not exist any longer!
“Home of the Eco” sim – Snapshots courtesy of Chiara Giordano
All in all, this time I did not get bored for even a second listening to my students’ presentations. On the contrary, I sincerely enjoyed all the presentations developed by my students at all their stages. I enjoyed watching they plan their projects step by step; I enjoyed even more to see those project take shape in SL little by little. I enjoyed to observe the dedication with which my students, each in his or her way, shaped their work and, more than once during the long process, I felt proud of their work and of their linguistic achievements.
My students worked a lot before and during their presentations, they learned new things and, since they had to use the voice chat, they all got to speak in Italian for a considerable amount of time, both while delivering their presentations and during the Q&A sessions after each individual presentation.
Though it was by no means an easy assignment I suspect that in the end they also had fun, at least, I hope so… I did!
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