Title: Manufacturing Trends Research and Presentation
Course: Manufacturing Language Arts > Section: Home Page

Beginning in module nine, you will begin researching for a presentation assignment on careers in manufacturing. This assignment is due in module eleven.

For the assignment, you will begin by picking a manufacturing career that you would like to investigate in more detail. You might want to use the Manufacturing Career Companion to help guide you in your choice. Feel free to email me in order to discuss possible careers or narrow down your choices.

After you have picked a career that you are going to research, you should start going about gathering materials. At a minimum, you should be able to provide a general overview of what work people who are in the field you are looking at do on a daily basis. You should also be able to describe the education and training that is necessary for such a career, the typical starting salary and average established salary in the field, and current trends and opportunities for those who are in or pursuing the career.

To research the career, you can use the internet, college’s library, public library, or the college’s career services office. If you happen to know someone in the field, you could also interview them. On the internet, you might want to look up general information about the field on some of the employment and career websites such as Monster, Career Search, and Indeed. You may also find information on Wikipedia or other resources.

Your presentation should cover all the topics listed above. While you obviously cannot make an in-person presentation given the online format of this course, you should use your creativity to reimagine what a presentation might look like over the internet. You will post your presentation on the discussion board, but you can include links to outside content, both information that you have found on the web and materials that you have created yourself. Below you will find a list of three sites that you might want to use to create content for the presentation, but you should feel free to present your material in any format you want, including a more traditional essay format. You can also upload files such as an audio or video presentation directly to your discussion board post.

Prezi – Prezi allows you to create multimedia slide shows that others can view. It is sort of like creating a series of posters, though with many more options, for your presentation (or, if you are familiar with PowerPoint, it is even more akin to that).

Tumblr – Tumblr is a social networking website that allows users to post multimedia from around the web and share short user-created snippets of text, photos, videos, and more. You could bring together all the different information you found around the web in a Tumblr account, provide short annotations, and share it with the class.

YouTube – YouTube is not just for cat videos; it can also be a great place to upload a video of a traditional in-person presentation. Or, perhaps you want to shoot some short videos that you can integrate with other material. If so, YouTube can be the platform on which you put your videos.

If you have any questions at all, you should post them on the general discussion board or email me directly.