Pecha Kucha Presentation in Rarotonga

Click on the image and read what Pecha Kucha means. 

Last week on 21st July I had the ultimate opportunity to present in front of an international audience. Wow! Those of you who have been looking at my blog will know that I am one of the Manaiakalani innovative teachers this year. 

Towards the end of May this year we found out that we will be lucky enough to travel to Rarotonga and share our learning journey regarding our projects this year with educators over in Raro. 

So, when I started working on preparing my Pecha Kucha presentation in order to share my learning journey of where I am at with my project so far, you can well imagine the excitement. I was absolutely thrilled but a little bit nervous as well. My project this year focusses on designing a tool that helps with raising my learners' critical literacy skills. I have been really working on providing the learners' in my class with the opportunities that not only raise their critical literacy skills but engages them in their learning at an level where this raise in their skills is sustained for years to come and becomes a well established skill they use for a prolonged period of time. 

Therefore, my main focus has been around developing their ability to question, generate discussions about texts they read and through texts they read. 

So, we all prepared 20 slides to present and the slide I just showed in the screencastify above was one of the slides. I found learning to prepare for the Pecha Kucha presentation a bit nerve wrecking as the whole process for me was something I had not really done a lot of. 20 images, 20 slides and you talk about each image. You have to talk more and write less- it's basically an image on the slide and you talk about it but you only have to cover what you want to say about the image in 20 seconds. And it is not as easy as it sounds- there's a bit of trick to it which I am really thankful to acquire (kind of acquire) before the big presentation at the Manaiakalani Wananga held in October in Auckland. 

Me presenting

I will definitely say one thing that my presentation in Raro was not perfectly a good example of Pecha Kucha presentation, however, the experience I gained from doing this presentation was just invaluable. I got to present in front of educators in Raro and I got to share my learning with them. I got asked a lot of questions, which was really reassuring and made a lot of connections with the educators there. 

To sum up this post, I am really thankful to the Manaiakalani Education Trust and in particular Jenny, Dorothy and Matt from Manaikalani who were the driving force behind organising this once in a lifetime professional opportunity for us Manaiakalani innovative teachers this year, especially in the global conditions we are facing due to Covid 19. 

Thank you Manaiakalani Education Trust for making this happen for us. I will remember this experience in many many years to come and remember it every year as a motivator to do better to get better educational outcomes for all our learners.