Mentor Texts for Project Connect
Thinking about your Project Connect Symposium presentation.
Symposium intimidates a lot of students, mostly because speaking in front of peers, parents, community members and teachers can be frightening. The other fear factor is the uncertainty of it--not knowing what a symposium presentation should look like. The fact is, there is no single acceptable presentation format or style, so the question becomes, “What CAN your presentation look like?” The answer is up to you.
What’s important is communicating a clear and valuable message to an interested audience. Key elements of a successful presentation are likely to include:
●Use of relevant narrative (storytelling)
●Use of compelling visuals aids, preferably digital
●Incorporation of meaningful research
●Engagement of audience
Ultimately, the audience must be interested in or care about what the speaker has to say, must understand the author’s message, and should, to some extent, buy the ideas the speaker is selling.
Using the Mentor Text
Mentors guide us, help us make our own decisions. A mentor text, or in this case, mentor videos, guide the decisions we make about the creation of our own texts. When you view this video linked below, consider the presentation not as something you must mimic, but as something from which you might learn. Observe the speaker’s tone and presentation of himself as an engaging speaker. What can you take from him? And what should you leave behind? What strategies do you see yourself using when you present at symposium? How will you tweak them? Adapt them? What’s missing that you still have to figure out?
To get the most out of a mentor text, you should give it a close viewing and thoughtful analysis. Watch the video linked below. As you watch, consider each of the questions listed:
Why Videos Go Viral by Kevin Allocca
●What is the speaker’s message?
●How does the speaker engage his audience and maintain their interest?
●How does the speaker use narrative/storytelling to communicate an idea?
●How does the speaker present research to support or demonstrate an idea? Does he credit the source of the research? How?
●How does the speaker use visuals to enhance his presentation? What does he NOT do with visual aids?
Then, for an annotated version to help you think through these questions, click here.
Finding Multiple Mentors
If one mentor is helpful, you can certainly benefit from multiple mentors. As you you envision and prepare your symposium presentation, ask the same questions of two or three of these how-to videos and TED Talks. You might find ideas for a completely different approach:
Demonstrations
●Johnny Lee Wii Head Tracking
●Killer Crossover
●Weightlifting How-To
●How to Moonwalk
●How to Kickflip
●How to Microbraid
●Sham Wow Ad
Presentations
●Being Young and Making an Impact
●Digital Privacy
●How to Make a Splash in Social Media
●100,000 Person Classroom
●Underwater Astonishments
●Dare to Educate Afghan Girls
●Looks Aren’t Everything
●A Teen Just Trying To Figure It Out
●Embrace the Remix
Thinking about Connect Texts
Perhaps the toughest challenge in creating a connect text is deciding what you want to create. I like to ask a few more questions in pursuit of the answer to that question:
●What information or message do you need to convey?
●Who needs to receive it?
●What is the best way for you to communicate with that audience?
The answers to these question will help you decide what sort of connect text you want to create: a petition, a pamphlet, an infographic, a video, an interview, a series of tweets, a children’s book. The same answers will also shape the finer decisions you make in creating your connect text: how to use visual elements, what research to present and how to present it, how much text to use, and how to use it. Ultimately, the aim doesn’t change. You always want to affect your audience purposefully. Looking at a few mentor texts might help you think through your own decisions later on.
Using the Mentor Text
Mentor texts for your connect texts are incredibly important. Initially, the goal is simply to understand HOW a writer might approach the creation of the text. As you view this infographic, answer these questions to begin developing that understanding:
●Who is the author’s intended audience? For whom has he created this text?
●What is the purpose of the text? That is, what does the author hope his audience will understand, do, think, or feel as a result of viewing/listening to/experiencing it?
●How does the author organize information in this text?
●How does the author use visual elements to communicate a message to his audience?
●How does the author use textual (spoken or written) elements to communicate ideas? What did he NOT do with text?
●Why was the chosen format (infographic, voicethread, pamphlet) a good format for this author to communicate his message to his audience?
Is the infographic a good choice for you? Maybe it’s not. Check out a different type of text: a Voicethread. Voicethreads, a web 2.0 tool that allows the author to narrate a series of images, are a great way to combine textual and visual elements.
View this Voicethread mentor text and answer the questions above. (Hint: click the arrow in the bottom right corner to skip the viewer comments and focus on the original text created by the author.) As you analyze this Voicethread, remember that what you create need not be a Voicethread or an infographic. These mentor texts merely offer a way of thinking through someone else’s creative process, so that it might guide your own creative process. Still, it might be helpful to consider a few more possibilities.
Finding Multiple Mentors
Because the possibilities for your connect texts are so vast, it is important to consider multiple mentor texts. The same questions you answered before apply here as well:
●Adam Lambert, “It Gets Better”
●Cody Smith, Notecard Video.
●Thing Link
Whatever format you end up choosing, you should look at several examples and steal the best strategies for your own product.