PowerPoint Karaoke

Activity

Ongoing engagement, Warm up activities

PowerPoint Karaoke

Maha Bali

Jasmina Najjar

Hoda Mostafa

Engage students in improv presenting, and enhance oral presentation skills in a light and humorous way.

Tech needed: Video conferencing, Breakout rooms, Shared online space, Cameras off option

Synchronous

Accessibility: Visual, Auditory, High bandwith

Duration: Variable

Student preparation: Minimal

Educator preparation: Moderate

ACTIVITY PURPOSE

To build students’ confidence and oral presentation skills through light-hearted, improvised presentations using unexpected visual prompts.

USEFUL FOR

Warming up, helping students get over shyness and anxiety over presenting, bringing some light-hearted fun into class, possibly teaching some digital literacies and presentation skills. It can also be useful for teaching how to use images to convey messages without resorting to putting lots of text on slides.

PREPARATION

If the teacher is providing the slides, they can either set aside a bit of time to make their ownor buy them from PowerPoint Karaoke website.
However, if you want to go through the process of encouraging students to create slides for each other, this could take much less preparation from the teacher.

INSTRUCTIONS

At its simplest, the teacher provides a slide deck with a topic and some (seemingly or actually) random images on 10 slides. They then give students (individually or in pairs or small teams) 10 minutes to go through the slides spontaneously, building a story as they go along.

DURATION

Variable prep time and variable presentation time depending on how many students/pairs/trios are presenting. Each presenter/team will use up 10 minutes per presentation.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

We suggest giving students time (e.g. in breakout rooms or outside class) to work in teams to create slide decks for other teams to present. This would serve to give the “slide deck creators” experience finding openly-licensed images and putting together a creative slide deck, while giving the “presenter” teams the experience of improv presenting – and an overall fun experience for everyone.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Something like Google slides to put the images (use ALT text for images as much as you can so that it is accessible to people with visual impairment) and share them between students. A synchronous tool that allows screensharing.
Make sure that the presenter group DO NOT have access to the slides, so they can’t prepare ahead of time!

USEFUL RESOURCES

You can find the instructions, ideas for scoring, and the free slide deck we’re using in the video here at PowerPoint Karaoke website. You can also buy additional slide decks from this site if you don’t want your students to create their own.