Yesterday I gave a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation on PowerPoint presentations for a grad school class. Here are the slides, followed by 7 things I learned from the experience. (Written in a style after the “If You Give a Moose a Muffin…” series of kids’ books.) Watch a video of this training session here.
1) If you leave for work in the morning with four pages of notes and no slides, you can still show up to the distance learning center at 2pm with a deck of 20. But it really helps if you have done other presentations before to pull slides from, and have a file on your computer called, “Potentially Useful Pictures” maintained over time. It allowed me to pull an apple out of my hat at the very last minute.
2) If you have an opening slide with a cool apple pic that follows the rules of good design, the A/V guy might ask you what you do for a living, which is, as @tonycarey would say, “kinda cool.”
3) Adults learners are okay with their trainer using a koosh ball as a means of calling on people. Don’t worry that it’s a technique only suited for middle school kids. It’s fun, and helps them pay attention.
4) Distance learning technology is fun! You can play with the different camera angles to make your classmates look good, and when it’s your turn you feel like a super-important professor being broadcast to the masses. Even though you are really only being watched by 5 people and the guys in the A/V office pushing the buttons.
5) If you go out of your way to choose a presentation topic you love that is relevant to your classmates, like “How to Give a Better Presentation,” your audience will be enthusiastic and attentive. They will say nice things like, “We should tell our prof to have you give this presentation for the rest of the class.” or “I love how much passion you have for this topic.”
6) If your professor asks you how you liked the Distance Learning technology and you respond enthusiastically, he might tell you about an opportunity in the works to teach forest firefighters about forest firefighting via teleconferencing at the university. At first you might think, um, that’s kinda random. But then you’ll think, “Wait, my husband works for the Forest Service. He has been through fire training, and keeps his gear in the trunk of our car. That, combined with my ability to learn anything and everything, makes me absolutely qualified for such a venture.” We’ll see what happens.
6) If you want to put your presentation notes on Slideshare, you have to change the font to something common or your formatting will be whacked out.
7) If you Twitter about this font issue, you’ll get a nice message from the person who represents SlideShare on Twitter. Then, if you’re lucky, the SlideShare people will choose your presentation to be featured on their homepage and send you a nice email telling you you are a presentation SuperStar. (SuperStar is a great word, because it makes people feel good, and because it’s fun to say with a fake lisp. Plus, if you write it with two capital S’s, it has a cool Web 2.0 feel to it.) Then, because you are featured on the SlideShare homepage, more people will see your work and some people will add you to their favorites list. It makes you feel good to be someone’s “favorite.”
Here are some links to a few of my favorite resources for better presentations:
Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen blog
Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design’s (the agency that created the visuals for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” Slideology blog
Before and After, a cool graphic design magazine with really good pdf articles on good presentation slide design.
Books by Robin Williams (the graphic designer, not Mork)
Please share your favorite presentation resources in the comments!
This is post #2 out of 200 imperfect blog posts in 365 days.
