Saturday, November 04, 2006

Another presentation fraught with problems

Yesterday I made a presentation at the LaTESOL conference in Baton Rouge, LA. I wanted to show the participants some of the cool tools that are available online. It started off well. I had set up a wiki with links to a lot of things and wanted us to look at the ones they were most interested in. I could access the wiki fine, but we were unable to access all the sites. It wasn't that they were blocked -- just a connection problem of some sort.

We talked about many of the tools and I was able to answer many of their questions even though I wasn't able to actually show them the tools. So on the whole, I was pretty content. I felt a little stupid every time a new site didn't open, but they seemed to take it in stride.

It is so much nicer to do an internet based presentation than a typical "slide show". But when they don't work, it is a problem. I had most of the presentation in an OpenOffice Presentation, but I didn't want to do it that way. I couldn't have individualized the program nearly as well. But I have to think about how I an do this in the future. I don't want another technology problem in a presentation on technology -- It's hard to win converts that way!

2 comments:

Lesley said...

You were extremely brave to attempt such a perilous exercise and I'm sure your audience appreciated that.

teachagiftedkid said...

It happens to everyone. My son and I had this awesome presentation set up for a church event a few years ago and wouldn't you know, that was the only time the presentation didn't work! Aaarrgghh!

Think on the bright side. Maybe someone sitting there in the audience needed to see that technology can fail sometimes and it isn't their fault.