Mini Lesson — jQuery Fundamentals
Sanj and myself worked on the Mini Lesson project together. We were assigned to present a mini-lesson based on jQuery Fundamentals. In the beginning we struggled to find an exciting way to tell a quite bland an boring subject to our class. We wanted to try and make it not only engaging, but incredibly useful.
We decided when brainstorming ideas, that we would focus on making this presentation similar to a beginners guide to give the very basics of jQuery such as what it is, where to get it, how to put it on your site and the structure of a function.
The best way to present this, in our opinion was through Google Slides presentation. We were trying to find a more interactive way of presenting it as it is quite static and passive, however, in the time frame we had, this was not possible and couldn’t find a solution. This would be an improvement if we were to do this again. We did however find that it was quite Interactive for a presentation, especially by linking to W3 Schools to show examples live.
We planned and practiced the presentation through a Rehearsal of the presentation the day before. We also made some notes for each slide, so that we knew exactly what to talk about. We also made notes that were an extension to the presentation so engage the audience.
As our Presentation was a guide, we decided to assume that the class didn’t know much jQuery despite knowing they knew the basics. This is because we wanted this to be their go-to solution for our peers to go-to when starting a new project and they need a kick start to get them using jQuery.
As our Team was very small, we didn’t have any team roles. This would have been silly as it was just Sanj and Myself. We both did research and used a lot of information from Jon Duckett’s book on jQuery Fundamentals, remaking visuals in more clear way. Both and we both them worked on the presentation and making notes presented and shared equal amount of slides.
We tried to hook the audience through how we spoke and our body language, but also by making it clear from the outset that this guide is the basics and fundamentals as a go-to guide for them specially. I felt that personalizing it towards them helped to engage the audience. We tried to speak slowly and in steps, just like a guide would be. Our body language was confident and expressive to show the audience we knew what we were talking about and giving them faith and trust in what we were saying.
An improvement that I would make would be to take it even further and create a V2 of the guide, tackling some more complex issues that our class may be having.
