Scared or nervous about making that big presentation?

Never presented anything before?

Now you can practice online using Presenters Podium as part of your course structure. Presenters Podium gives people the ability to go online, practice a presentation and get peer evaluations.

Last Tuesday 21st October I talked to Matt from Presenters Podium. He ran me through their great new platform for people to practice their presentations. Here’s a run down of the conversation.

Background: Presenters Podium found that after finishing courses people were unfamiliar with verbally presenting a topic or an idea online. So they put together Presenters Podium, a platform where people can video themselves presenting and get peer feedback.

This is a place for classrooms and groups to join and practice together. If you are a tutor or a lecturer you can incorporate peer reviewed presentations into your coursework and use Presenters Podium as the vehicle.

How does it work?

Teachers post a topic and give a time limit for the presentation e.g. five minutes. Students come on board and practice their presentation, then post their final presentation to be reviewed. Then, the students view other presentations, give some constructive written feedback and score the presentation on a given rubrics. Teachers get the rubrics score and can also see the final presentation.

Teachers can just let students get on with it and come back later – sounds great for a teacher!

What I like:

– Online rubrics creator. Teachers can create the rubrics from suggestions or add criteria themselves.

– Two types of peer reviews, short answer gives feedback to the student, the rubrics gives an actual score.

– Instead of everyone being able to review everyone else’s presentations, each week four different people are grouped together to give feedback to each other.

– Recalling information and presenting that information brings about a full learning circle, this is not a new idea, Bloom writes about this in the highest level of his taxonomy – recalling, remembering and retrieving information.

– Students can get embed codes and embed the presentation into another page/website.

It does cost money, there’s no freemium with Presenters Podium, if it is going to benefit you and your class (which you won’t know until you’ve tried) it’s definitely worth paying $15 for the first level subscription.