5 great ways to close your presentation

Six ways to effectively close your presentation are:

1. A short summary.
Simple, straightforward and effective.
For example, if your presentation has three takeaways, just summarize those three quickly. Or, summarize your main point.

2. The title close.
Have a clever title of your presentation that summarizes your main message?
Use it as the last line of your presentation. It’ll cement it in people’s minds.

3. A call-to-action.
If your presentation has a call-to-action in it, make it the last thing you say. That’ll again be what people remember and inspire them to take that next step.

The key here – make it clear. If you want people to speak to their Headteacher, tell them to speak to their Headteacher. Heck, give them a script. The clearer and easier the call-to-action is, the more people will do it.

4. A personal tagline.
Bergells gave the example of a sales manager who closed every sales presentation with “Sell value.” Russell Wilson, quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks, ends every interview he does with “Go Hawks.”

Over time, this will build your personal brand and reinforce your message. Or, if there is a phrase you use again and again in your presentation, use it again as the closer.

“The constant drumbeat of a few choice words can make you and your message more memorable to your audience,” Bergells said.

5. A quote.
A quote can be a satisfying way to end a presentation, as it makes it both credible and memorable. Of course, the key is selecting a good quote, that is both unique and sums up the point of your message.

If done well, most people will walk away from your presentation remembering that quote and your message behind it.

Read the full article here

Stephen King Writing Tips

Stephen King’s books have sold over 350 million copies. Here are our favourite pieces of advice for aspiring writers:

First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”

Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence “He closed the door firmly.” It’s by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isn’t ‘firmly’ an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”

Don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. “

Read, read, read. “You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

Turn off the TV. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

Hsis Computing and Online Safety Subject Leaders’ Network meeting

Date: Thursday 16th November 2016 – 4.15pm-5.45pm (refreshments available from 4.00pm)
Venue: Mead Primary

We are delighted to be hosting the Autumn Term 2017 Hsis Computing and Online Safety Subject Leaders’ Network meeting at Mead Primary School.

Meeting Foci
We will be sharing our current practice relating to integrating Google G-suite for teaching and learning and staff use across our Learning Federation.

Google Summit Training

Our Teaching School has a number of SLEs that can help schools with their use of ICT to support collaboration and communication. As part of our development of this capacity we attended the Google Back to School Summit in October.

There were lots of handy hints and tips:

• Using Google Forms to help communicate requests for support. These could be tweaked to: request School 2 School help, get the site manager to look at an aspect of the school site, send a request to an ICT technician.
• Hear about the power of 10x thinking and reflect on what this might mean in our schools
• Challenge children with the Smarty Pins hack of Google Maps: https://smartypins.withgoogle.com/

We can't wait to share these ideas with our own staff and other colleagues. Our SLEs will be using some of this content at the upcoming Havering ICT Conference, and the next ICT subject leaders meeting.

Teach Like A Champion: Sentence Expansion

All teachers would appreciate that effective writing doesn't come from just having kids ‘write a lot’. Success comes from having pupils learn to create the basic forms of writing, especially the sentence, in a methodical progression that shows them how and has them complete exercises repeatedly until they are able to apply them confidently.

Doug Lemov has a great article on his blog that uses some of the simplest conjunctions to help create reflective and extended sentences...

http://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/hochmans-sentence-expansion-activity/

Harold Hill Cluster Teach Meet

Harold Hill Cluster Teach Meet

Broadford Primary School recently hosted a Teach Meet session for teachers working in the local area. Networking like this provides an opportunity for teachers to come together across clusters and neighbouring schools to share best practice and explore new ideas.

Teach Meets are for teachers, led by teachers. This was an opportunity for fellow year group partners to support one another and for year group leaders to lead CPD, as we all know we can learn most effectively from one another.

The focus for the session was 'Maths Starters'. Each teacher gave a 2 minute presentation on an idea that they have used successfully in their classroom.

Towards the end of sessions and having been exposed to many new ideas to use back in the classroom, we asked teachers to complete a survey about their experience of the Teach Meet.

56 teachers completed the survey:

89% agreed that they had learnt something new that could help improve their own practice.

87% thought it was a useful chance to network.

84% said that the event had helped them to think about their own practice and self- improvement.

We also asked how we could improve the Teach Meet sessions. Some of the responses we received were;

"I would like the opportunity to work with more school for a greater range of ideas." Year 6 teacher

"Everyone should bring concrete examples to take away." Year 3 teacher.