|Gemini Space Capsule, Air and Space Museum, The Smithsonian|
|Research Notes, "Ode to the Imagination," Little Office of the Immaculate Conception|
Never mind the fact I'd only put together one Powerpoint presentation in my life. Never mind that my son had the flu and most of my notebooks are in storage: no time like the present, I reasoned, to throw myself out there to the sharks.
I began by taking a bunch of snapshots of poem drafts/notes in some recent notebooks. Then I troved Google Images and my own iPhoto collection for pertinent images. And then I started in with uploading photos and text, plus creating bulleted lists.
I admit it was a very fun process (much more fun than lecturing on the comma splice or eviscerating--err, I mean explicating--someone else's poem), but one thing I forgot is that a bunch of slides does not a successful presentation make! Oops! Also, why did I think I would never lose my place, never forget which slide came next?
Dear audience, thanks for putting up with me while I surprised myself as slides I forgot were there appeared when I hit "return." I must have come off like either a 90-year old amnesiac or a 5-year old let loose with a Mac. Forgive me, please, dear students of UW!
Honestly, I did not intend to be quite so transparent with my nascent PP skills, but when else to find that out but before a crowd of 80 or 90 that I needed to practice a little more at home, perhaps rehearsing more than once with the son with the 100-degree fever before it went to 101 and morphed to a tummy ache/headache/flu!? Anyway, other than a few (I hope) minor techno glitches/surprised looks from the presenter as she tried and failed to synch what she was saying with what was on the screen, I was quite pleased with how it all went off.
Best of all, now that I've done a full-length (class hour) PP presentation, I am SOLD. It's the best way to convey information to a large group of students with varying degrees of interest or expertise on a given subject. I am already scheming with how I will continue to revise this presentation, adding music and YouTube film clips of such things as Alan Shepard hanging out in his rocket before take-off, and of course David Bowie's "Space Oddity" booming in the background, along with ELO's "Telephone Line."
|Research Notes: "Ode to Imagination"|