Look Ma No Words!

I missed a post in December due to medical complications so I need to make up a post to make my posts line back up.  

So this post is about what my students are starting as soon as they are back from their snow/inclement weather delays.  One of the skills needed in today's professional arena is the ability to speak in public and if you listen to my student's they hate the concept.  Every semester we've been doing at least one presentation.  Sometimes they go really well, sometimes we have to talk about ways they could be made better and one major issue that is always faced.... THE COPY AND PASTE PARAGRAPH on a slide.... Enough to drive me buggy.  

I even sell my self out with students and let them know that my classroom presentations are not good examples of really great presentations because I have all the words from their graphic organizer on the board to fill in so it is easier for them and not actually great presentation wise.  That is a non-education presentation there should be very minimal words.  So what better way to insure that I don't get a copy and paste paragraph anymore?  There's no words on the content slides!  *evil cackle*

So here's the break down of my project:

Groups were randomly assigned a person relevant to the Gilded Age.  They have a research paper to fill out, in which they need 5 acceptable sources (while I'm willing to take a sourced Wikipedia page, I do not accept wikianswers or any other answer websites with no sourcing). 

After they've filled out the research page, they need to break down who is going to talk about what.  Group Communication is one class in college that I understood the point of, but it still caused stress because you had to be interdependent on someone else as well, but life skill wise the majority of jobs you'd be doing a team presentation and not an individual presentation.  Each group member needs to have something to say in each section and they need to work on their flow with each other so it isn't choppy.  

Presentation wise, they are making a Keynote.  The first slide and last slide are the only slides with words on them.  The first will have the person's name and the group members' names; the last slide will have the sourcing.  All the other slides will have images that pertain to what the student is talking about, but no words are allowed.

To be fair, I am allowing them to have one note card each for the presentation so they can have a reference point.  There are NOT allowed to be sentences on their note card, just key items to make sure they talk about (and numbers if they need to remember what order they're supposed to talk for each slide).  

Hopefully this goes wonderful... Time will tell...