Presentation Design 101
Keep audiences visually engaged with a slick, well-designed presentation. If you’ve ever had to present to a group of people, you know how intimidating it can be. You know things can go wrong.
*The Presenter’s Hat (Barbara Braxton)
I recently read and reviewed Luke, a wonderful addition to the wonderful Stuff Happens series which is “a contemporary reflected-reality fiction series for young boys aged 7 to 11 years old”. In this episode written by James Valentine, Luke suffers from glossophobia – the fear of public speaking. At the same time I was reading it, I was preparing a full-day presentation for newbie teacher librarians and I realised that while sharing my thoughts with others, either in person or in writing, is not difficult for me, there are many in the profession who are like Luke. Thus, when the profession’s leaders call for advocacy and tell us it is our job to speak up to ensure that our learning communities know what it is we do, this can be an anathema for many or at least, something with which they are very uncomfortable. Know your audience This is the most critical element because it shapes not only what you will speak about but also how you will say it.
10 Powerpoint Tips for Preparing a Professional Presentation
Presentations, whether made with PowerPoint or another tool, are a great way to support a talk, visualize complicated circumstances or focus attention on the subject. 10 Tips for Making Better PowerPoint Presentations with Office 2016 10 Tips for Making Better PowerPoint Presentations with Office 2016 Microsoft PowerPoint continues to set new standards. New features in PowerPoint 2016 manifest its top spot as the best option for smart and creative presentations. Read More
30 Legendary Startup Pitch Decks and What You Can Learn From Them
If you need to raise funding from VCs for your startup, the first step is to create a pitch deck. A pitch deck is a brief presentation that provides investors with an overview of your business, whether it’s showcasing your product, sharing your business model, giving a look into your monetization strategy, and introducing your team. A pitch deck is an essential fundraising tool, whether you’re looking to raise $50,000, $500,000 or $50 million. Despite the brevity of the presentations, which usually run for 10 slides or less, creating a pitch deck that wins investment is no easy task.
*Brain Rules for Presenters
We know that it takes you about 10 minutes to lose an audience if you’re just giving a normal talk. So at the nine-minute-and-59-second mark, you have to do something fairly radical. In fact, you should do it within 30 seconds of your first words, but certainly at nine minutes and 59 seconds. And here is where we can get into some brain science. I think anybody who does speeches at all ought to really understand that the brain processes meaning before it processes detail. It wants the meaning of what it is that you’re talking about before it wants the detail of what it is you’re talking about.
10 tips for better slide decks
When your slides rock, your whole presentation pops to life. At TED2014, David Epstein created a clean, informative slide deck to support his talk on the changing bodies of athletes. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED
15 tips on presenting to a board
One of the questions I most frequently get asked when people hear I sit on company boards isn’t about executive pay packages. Instead, they want to know how to present to a board so its members will say yes. The question always calls to mind a presentation that went wrong. Several years ago, a rather dandified fellow from inside a company gave a presentation to a board I sat on. He was snide at times, made several off-colour jokes, winked at board members and made his political leanings clear with side remarks about the government of the day. When he didn’t know the answers to questions we asked, he tried to fob them off as irrelevant.
8 Google Slides Tips You Should Know Before Your Next Presentation
Google Slides is quickly becoming one of the best pieces of presentation software available. Far from its bare bones beginnings, its latest features offer you more chances than ever to create presentations that amaze your audience. As the video below shows, with a little creativity and patience, Google Slides can do almost anything — including animation! As cool as that project is, it’s not what most of us are using Google Slides for.
4 Ways We Can Share Our Stories to Drive Innovation #Podcast – George Couros
In 2015, I wrote a post titled “4 Ways We Can Share Our Stories to Drive Innovation”, and I wanted to revisit some of the ideas shared in my podcast. I am often asked, “How do we share some of the great things we are doing beyond scores?” I know this is something schools will have to continue to share, but I feel it is something this standard does not limit us, and many schools go beyond merely sharing scores. Check out the podcast on the topic, or you can read a slightly updated version of the original post below. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or Spotify, or watch on YouTube. There is no more human profession in the world than education.
