20 slides, 20 seconds per slide – that is Pecha Kucha.

If your students perform short presentations in class, and you’re looking for a new way to challenge them, consider the presentation style known as Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chit chat”). It works like this:

Based on their assigned topics, students create PowerPoint presentations of 20 slides each which are set to auto-advance every 20 seconds. On each slide, students display a picture or a brief set of words that work as the backdrop to whatever they are discussing. The idea is that students have to be more thoughtful and better prepared for their class presentations, which are delivered within a very specific time frame (the total presentation time is 6 minutes and 40 seconds). They cannot rely on the overuse of text and bullets in their slides, which often lead to bland, less imaginative presentations. Presentations have the potential to be more fun for the presenter and the audience, while compelling students to be more concise and imaginative in presenting their topics.

You can certainly adapt this style as you see fit (ex. 15 slides at 30 seconds per slide). This style should not be a replacement for traditional presentations, which can often be more methodically-paced and anecdote-based. This is simply an alternative presentation style for improving preparation and presentation skills.

Check out the following resources, and see videos of actual Pechu Kucha presentations in action – a mix of the good and not so good, depending on the presenter’s level of preparation:

When it comes to PowerPoint slides, I know it’s the content that matters. But sometimes, my 8:00 a.m. class to be exact, I need just a little spice to wake the senses - for that, pptPlex delivers. A free plug-in available from Microsoft Labs, pptPlex is not just a visual design tool, it’s an organizational device too. The basic idea is that instead of linear slide transitions, you have a canvas to freely zoom around on-you’re not tied to the next slide.

The canvas is as large as you like, as are the groups of slides that you need. You can collect all your slides by topic as an example, see them arranged side-by-side, then jump around to the exact point you want to emphasize. The transitions happen as you move the mouse around, clicking to focus in on a group, down to individual slides with ease, then back out again. I find pptPlex’s visual organization a great way to keep my comments on track, without worrying what slide might be next. And at 8:00 a.m., who knows what I’ll need to zoom in on.

To try pptPlex yourself, go to: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptplex/Pages/default.aspx. Be advised that the College does not support this tool, though.

In the November 2008 issue of Digital Bridges, Ian Hiatt described how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology "is now providing the groundwork for a world-renowned education to anyone with an internet connection at an amazing cost—free."

What is open courseware and what might it mean to Bridgewater State University? According to the OpenCourseWare Consortium, "An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses." These courses could include (or omit) lecture notes, assignments, projects, exams, lectures, or entire textbooks.

For example: you find that a certain textbook is slightly too advanced for your students and develop a series of handouts to bring your class "up to speed" and support the text. When posted on the internet, these would make up a (very minimal) open courseware.

Similarly, if you get tired of that text and decide to write your own, your text could become an open courseware. Add your homework assignments, sample solutions, exams, a scoring guide, videos of your lectures, and samples of student projects and you'll have created a resource that students from Zimbabwe to Martha's Vineyard can use for self study, home schooling, or in planning a lecture at their local college or university.

What could this mean to Bridgewater? There are approximately 450 students taking precalculus (MATH 100) right now. If each student paid $50 for a text book (a conservative estimate, for the book store charges close to $100) that's $22,500 spent on text books this fall. If a well developed BSU precalculus opencourseware could keep that money in our students' pockets, semester after semester, what would that mean for the local economy? What if we could reduce textbook costs for multiple courses? Could our students take more time away from their jobs to study?

Writing textbooks and publishing them freely online is a big task which might have big consequences down the road.

Introduced in 2007, the term “netbook” is commonly used to describe small, inexpensive computers. Netbooks usually range in size from 5” to 12” wide diagonally and often weigh around 2.5 pounds. Netbooks sacrifice computing power and removable features to bring longer battery life and lower cost to the consumer. So what makes a laptop a netbook? Their first innovative feature is the absence of an optical CD or DVD drive. Relying solely on the Internet for downloading, or removable USB drives for transferring data, netbooks may even spurn the traditional hard disk drive (HDD) for what’s known as a solid-state disk drive (SSD). SSDs contain flash memory, similar to a removable USB drive, and therefore have no moving parts. SSDs require much less power and are quicker and lighter than comparable HDDs, but only come in small sizes by comparison, currently maxing out at 64 gigabytes.

Netbooks also differ significantly from laptops in power, speed and graphics. The Intel Atom is probably the most popular processor in netbooks today, due to its balance of maintaining speed while featuring low power consumption. Other hardware, specifically graphics cards, had to find a way to work properly in this reduced computing environment. Nvidia, with the introduction of the Ion chip, integrated fast graphic processing with Atoms so that netbooks would also be able to run resource intensive operating systems like Windows 7.

Finally, netbooks differ from larger laptops in their use of software. Many netbooks offer open-source operating systems such as Ubuntu Linux rather than Microsoft Windows as a cost-saving measure. Usually Ubuntu units cost approximately $250 versus an approximate cost of $350 for Windows. Most application data is not stored on the smaller hard drives; instead it is outsourced to an endless array of removable USB devices for back-up and safekeeping. Netbooks today seem to fulfill a specific niche: a second portable computer, not a laptop replacement, for those of us on the go and on a budget who may not need all the bells and whistles of a bigger machine.