Training English Teachers to Use Power Point

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I taught a seminar to 30 English teachers in Taraz. The goal of the seminar was to teach them how to use power point in their classrooms. It was such an enjoyable time. To see more details about the seminar, you can go to the Interlink blog. I thought I'd use my blog to tell some stories from my time.

On the first day, I spent time showing them how to do some very basic things on Power Point. Due to the fact that half the class had never used Power Point before, it was extremely basic. Those that had already used Power Point, played on their computers while I talked, while the others followed my step by step instructions.

One of the teachers in the seminar, Oksana, could have taught the class by herself. She knew more about Power Point than I do. Since the computers were in Russian (which makes it difficult to find something that you don't know how to do in your sleep) I enlisted her help at several times throughout the class. She teaches very young children and the presentation that she created was really fun and complex.

Other teachers were apologetic about their presentations, but I reminded them that they had never done a presentation before. Those that had just learned how to do power point actually did far better than I expected.

As a thank you for my presentation, they gave me some earrings. The earrings are the kind that have a stud and then a chain that hooks to a designed hoop-thing that hooks over the top side part of your ear (where a lot of people have a second hole). At first I thought they were just dangly earrings - I know I'm not really fashion conscious. They told me that if I wanted to look young, I could put it up on the top part of my ear. I laughed and left them hanging down catching on all my clothing. What they were really trying to say, but were too polite to say was "you silly person, those are supposed to go on top of your ear, not hang down - you look really silly that way. Don't you know that you don't wear this hoop thing hanging down from your ear on a really long chain?" But, they were too polite to say more. When I got to the office and tried them on the other way, I realized that they looked much better the way they were supposed to be. We all got a bit of a laugh as we thought about what the entire group of 30 teachers thought. Oh well, I'll just have to wear them to the next seminar the right way.