Better than PowerPoint: 5 Exciting Ways ESL/EFL Students Can Present their Ideas

I have a love/hate relationship with student presentations.  On one hand, I love giving students a chance to stand up in front of the class and teach us all something.  They get to practice speaking in the target language in front of an audience, and I get to learn new things from them.  On the other hand, student presenters are often terrified to be standing in front of class, they frequently either speed through material so fast it is hard to understand what they are trying to say or they ramble on and on while everyone is shifting around uncomfortably waiting for them to get to the point.  If students present individually and you have a class of 20 or more, this can take up a lot of class time in which each student doesn't actually get very much speaking time.  I have found that a lot of these problems can be eliminated by changing the way students are asked to present.  When I first started asking students to present, I usually asked them to create a power point presentation figuring that that is the most common way they might be required to present in the future.  When I thought about it more however, I came to the conclusion that while power point is still used extensively, there are many more ways to present that are often more effective, require students to prepare better and require more active audience participation.  


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1. Poster Presentation

For this assignment, students are required to create a poster.  This can be just a large piece of paper or it can be a more elaborate 3 paneled cardboard creation that stands on its own.  It incorporates both visual elements and text and should show illustrate the main ideas and some of the details the presenter wants to get across to his/her audience.  When the poster is finished, the presenter uses it to talk about their topic and answer questions to small groups of his/her classmates.

Resources Needed:

• Pens
• Paper or cardboard
• glue

Advantages:

• Low tech - If you don't have a lot of computers, projectors or smart boards in your classroom or if you students are young or not super computer savvy, this is great.  All you really need for this kind of presentation is some paper and pens.  You can show your students how to make charts and graphs as well as drawings to illustrate their points.  You can also show them how to use visuals in coordination with text to create an easy to understand, memorable presentation.
• Multiple students can present at the same time - In a large class you can have 1/3 of the class presenting at a time while the other 2 thirds walk from poster to poster in pairs.
• The audience is active - Instead of just sitting in their chairs listening, the audience is walking around, listening and asking questions in a more casual, conversational manner with the presenter. 
• The speaker is less nervous - Instead of standing in front of the whole class, the presenter only has to talk to a few of his/her classmates at a time.
• The presenter has a chance to present multiple times - Practice makes perfect but when a student is presenting in front of the whole class, he/she only has a chance to do it once.  With the poster presentation each student has a chance to make his/her presentation many times. They also have a chance to answer many more questions than they would in other formats.

Disadvantages:

• The presenter does not really practice public speaking - As someone who used to hate speaking in front of a large audience but now loves it, I can attest that there is nothing that will get  you over your fear of public speaking like just getting up and doing it over and over again.  Students usually don't get as much practice speaking publicly as it would take for them to get over their fears and poster presentations will not really help with this since they are not speaking in front of many people.  Possible solution to this problem: invite other classes to your class when you students are presenting.  This will give students bigger, less familiar groups to present to.
• The teacher can't monitor all the presentations all of the time - I usually have to be evaluating each presenter so I have to go to each poster and listen to each presentation.  This means I can't observe what is happening with each group to see if they are staying focused or are getting off topic. Possible solution to the problem: Give students evaluation sheets in which they report back on the questions they asked and what they learned at each presentation.

2. Make a Movie

In this presentation, small groups of students (or individual students) create a video to show to the class.  I used this kind of presentation when  I wanted my students to practice giving instructions.  They had to choose something they knew how to do and give us step by step instructions while they demonstrated.  I loved this project because it took me into my students hearts and homes.  One of my students showed us how he made omelets because he was living alone for the first time and had to learn how to cook.  Another student took a video of himself drawing an eye in detail, speeded it up and explained how and why he was doing what he was doing.  Drawing was his passion and we were all inspired.  Before playing their videos, the presenters had to stand up in front of class, introduce themselves and the video they made.  They can then conduct a question and answer session afterwards.

Resources Needed:

• Some kind of video recording device (usually smart phones are the way to go)
• Video editing 
• a projector in the classroom

Advantages:  

• Videos are engaging for both the creator and the audience - You just have to take a quick browse through YouTube to see how much people love making videos and how interesting they are to watch.  There is something about being on film that is fascinating.
• Students get a chance to practice language extensively as they create their videos - Instead of just practicing the target language while they are up there speaking, they practice it while they are creating the videos.  Most students will practice before they record and rerecord if they make mistakes.  In this way they practice both their fluency and their accuracy. 
• Students get a chance to stand up and speak in front of a large audience - While most of the presentation is the video, students do have to present the video in front of the class so they do practice public speaking. 
• It is easy for the teacher to monitor both the presentation and the audience participation - The teacher becomes just another audience member albeit one who is responsible for giving feedback and making sure everyone behaves.  If you want, you can ask students to submit their videos to you so you don't have to grade them at that moment, you can watch them later at your leisure.  Of course, this will take up more time so as the teacher you can choose, grade it all at once, or give it a closer look later on. 

Disadvantages: 

• Requires student to have access to and knowledge of video making equipment-  Luckily with the advent of smart phones, many students have everything they need in their own pockets.  However, not every student in every part of the world has access to this kind of technology. Possible solution: If you have access to one or 2 video cameras, students can check them out for a limited amount of time.
• Can take up a lot of class time viewing videos - If students present their video, then the class watches the video and their is a short question/answer session after, this can take a lot of time.  I used to have classes of over 30 students and it was not feasible to spend an entire week doing nothing but watching videos.  Possible solution: Show just one or 2 videos at the beginning of each class.  Make a schedule so students know when their video will be presented. 

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3. Write and Share a Book

Books are a time honored way of getting information from one brain into another.  They are also incredibly diverse; books can, and are written on every topic under the sun and in a variety of formats. My high school students made illustrated bilingual books from fictional stories they wrote.  They then got to choose how they wanted to bind their books and ended up with works of art they read to other classes and then could take home and share with their families.  

When I taught in a Family Literacy program, my whole class made a book together, each person contributing a page.  They decided that it was important to teach their children what street signs meant so each person took a different sign, drew it on a page and wrote about it.  We then made copies for every member of the class. They shared them with their children while they walked together in the neighborhood.  

With university students, I asked them to work in small groups to gather information about where the food they ate was coming from.  They conducted interviews with grocers, farmers and restauranteurs as well as finding information on-line.  Their findings were then bound into book form and they shared what they learned with the other groups in class.  

Resources Needed:

• Paper
• Cardboard for covers (can be recycled)
• Anything else students want to use to decorate their books
• Some books on how to bind books.  Some of my favorite are Cover to Cover, and Making Handmade Books.

Advantages:

• Books are lasting, tangible objects that are easy to cary and share with others.  I found that students put a lot more effort into organizing and making books than they would have in a less lasting format.  Posters get thrown away, videos are stored on hard drives out of sight but books can become a part of a person's life as they are brought out again and again.
• Authoring a book empowers students.  Authors are seen as experts in their fields and when students become authors, it gives them a sense of pride and ownership of their learning.  They are also fun to share.
• Organizing a book encourages higher-order thinking skills.  Students must make a myriad of decisions when creating a book from what the covers will look like, how much information will be presented on each page, how information is best presented (text or illustrations), what the layout will look like and how the reader will be able to access information easily.  All of these decisions require students to think in different ways. 

Disadvantages:

• Creating a book takes time and resources.  Sometimes I like to use class time for students to do creative projects and hands on work but I find that it can also become a distraction from actually learning English.  Students can start obsessing about how everything looks and spend enormous amounts of time cutting, gluing and drawing silently.  It can also get expensive buying fancy paper, bookbinding tools and art supplies.  Possible Solution: use recycled materials and give students limited class time to work on their books.  There is so much waste in this world that makes wonderful art.  Cardboard can be turned into something spectacular.  Tin cans can be flattened.  Old clothes can be cut up.  There is no limit to the number of things that can be turned into a book cover or used as pages.
• Books are usually not very big and can be difficult to share with larger audiences.  I have seen some children's books blown up to enormous sizes so adults can read to a larger roomful of children but usually books are kind of small and people in the back rows have to strain to see the pages.  This can cause them to lose interest and start to misbehave. Possible solution:  if you want your students to share their books with a larger audience, you could have them take pictures of the pages of their books and then project them on a large screen while they read.  This will give them practice public speaking while still enabling them to read from their books.  

4. Give a Workshop

Students are used to being asked to listen to a teacher or presenter talk so when they are asked to give a presentation, that is usually the first thing that comes to their minds.  The extent of audience participation is usually limited to a question and answer period at the end.  I challenged my students to deviate from this standard when I asked them to do a workshop however.  In order to give them an idea of how a workshop differs from other kinds of presentations, I demonstrated it for them by giving them a workshop and helping them break down the components.  I showed them how to introduce the topic of their workshop, How to set up activities so their students are actively participating and creating something, how to wrap it up with a discussion and answer the participants questions.  We talked about how to write up instructions that participants could take notes on and take home.  I then asked my students to think of something they know how to do and can teach the rest of us in a workshop.  This could be anything from how to create music using our own bodies to how to save someone's life.  I left the topics up to the students but because I had too many students for everyone to give an individual workshop, they had to work in small groups.  Each group had to talk about what they knew how to do and what they had in common to come up with a topic in which every member of the group could contribute.  

Resources Needed:

• Varies depending on what students want to do in their workshops.

Advantages:

• Students have to work cooperatively - Because I asked students to work in groups, they really had to talk about their interests and talents with each other and figure out what each person could contribute.  
• Students had to think about their audiences - In many presentations, the presenter spends a lot of time practicing the presentation but doesn't spend much time at all thinking about the audience.  The audience is this kind of scary mass that is to be presented to.  In a workshop however, the presenter must think a lot about how many people will be in the audience, if they want the participants to work individually or in groups, as well as how and what they will ask them to do.
• Students must create materials - Because workshops are usually hands on, students need to think about what materials the participants will need in order to accomplish the task being asked of them.  They need to write instructions and think about how participants will use those instructions.  This allows them to practice many skills in their target language.
• The audience is active and engaged - One of the things that always worries me during student presentations is the amount of time most of the students are just sitting and listening passively or maybe not listening at all but falling asleep or being disruptive.  In workshops, everyone has to do something so they are usually a lot better behaved and are paying better attention.

Disadvantages:

• Time consuming - Introducing, creating something, wrapping up and answering questions all take time, a lot of time.  I set a time limit for my groups but not one of them were able to stick to it and I didn't have the heart to make them stop in the middle.  Possible solution: Help students break down exactly how many minutes they have for each section of the workshop and then make sure they are keeping track of time throughout.
• Students are being asked to do many things they may never have done before - Not only must students speak publicly, they need to create materials, group participants, monitor them for understanding and progress and evaluate their success.  In short, they need to do all the things good teachers do and that can be really challenging!  Possible solution: instead of assigning everything all at once, stagger the assignments.  Ask the groups to turn in their instruction sheets and materials ahead of time so you can look at them and offer advice.  Have students practice monitoring each other on tasks that you assign.  Instead of being the only one floating from group to group everyday, ask a few students to take on that role every week until it feels more comfortable to them. 

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5. Create a trade-fair booth

I used to work for a trucking company that had a driving school.  One of my responsibilities was to attract new students into the program and one big way we did that was by having booths at employment fairs.  I usually had a table to display information and little prizes to give away to people as well as a poster that explained who we were and how we could help you get a job.  I would spend the whole day talking to people about the trucking industry and answering their questions.  This required me to have a wide body of knowledge so I spent quiet a bit of time browsing trucking websites and talking to truckers about the positive and negative aspects of their jobs.  I stumbled into this job with absolutely no interest in trucking but found that as I became more knowledgeable it became more interesting to me and I enjoyed talking to people about it. 

When I was teaching English at a high school in Brooklyn, I saw one of the most important parts of my job was to inspire an interest in reading in my students.  One way we did this was by allowing groups of  students to choose what book they wanted to read.  When they finished they were able to choose how they wanted to present the book to the other groups.  One of their options was to create a booth.  I loved this option because they had to make things related to their books to give away like bookmarks with images and quotes from the book, brochures, buttons and other things.  It also encouraged them to really think about the book they had just read so they could explain why other students might want to read it.  

Resources Needed:

• tables
• paper, markers, scissors
• poster board

Advantages:

• It is a great project for groups.  Each student has to take individual responsibilities to create the materials for the booth but they have to work together to make it happen.  This means I can easily see who did what when it comes to evaluating student work.  
• It combines writing and speaking.  in order to create the materials for their booths, students must do a fair amount of writing but the bulk of the work at the booth is speaking.  They don't have prepared speeches so the speaking is more natural and conversational.  
• It builds job skills.  Like I wrote earlier, I got this idea from one of my many non-teaching jobs.  Being able to promote ideas and products is a skill that is required for many jobs and even though it can seem intimidating, it is actually a lot of fun.  

Disadvantages:

• It takes a lot of space to set up booths.  Depending on how many students you have and how your classroom is set up, it might be hard to squeeze that many booths into a tight space.  Possible solution: use the hallways or other "public" spaces for the fair.  
• It can be difficult to get enough people looking at the booths and asking questions if most of the students are presenting at their booths.  Possible solution: have students work in groups of 3 or 4.  Only one person should be presenting at the booth at any given time, the others should be looking at other booths and asking questions.  You could also invite other classes to come in especially if they haven't read those books yet and might be interested in reading them in the future.

What creative ways do you have of getting your students to present their work and ideas? Please share in the comments.

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For more creative teaching ideas, check out these posts.