Don’t Let This Be You!

As you move through high school, you may have more and more opportunities to make presentations to different audiences. You may have had teachers who also use electronic presentations in the classroom. The more experience you have with them, the stronger an opinion you are going to have on what you think makes an effective presentation and what might not. Watch this fun music video clip about how a Powerpoint presentation might fail!

Microsoft Powerpoint, Google Slides, and Prezi are all presentation software programs that you may be familiar with, but there are many more options as well. Take a look at the following website which outlines many other free presentation software programs.

Presentation Software & Powerpoint Alternatives

But It’s All In The Delivery

View the following video and consider these tips next time you have to present to a group of people.

Jess’ main ideas in this video are:

• ensure your content is relevant
• ensure that you have tools to engage your audience
• focus on using an effective tone of voice

Work Backwards

How can you make strong, effective electronic presentations? Let’s start with what not to do by watching the following video:

Alright. Now that you know what not to do, watch the following video to get some good ideas for effective presentation.

How to Give an Awesome (PowerPoint) Presentation

So, to summarize, an effective presentation will

• Tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end
• Focus on the rule that Less is More
• Ensure that each slide has a clear focus on only One Key Idea
• Effectively use images, minimal text, supporting graphs and possibly quotes
• Ensure that the audience doesn’t have to read and listen at same time
• Be rehearsed!

Options For Everyone

Not everyone is comfortable speaking at the front of a classroom. Fortunately, technology provides students with many presentation options.

Let’s look at two of those options.

1. Make a video of your presentation to tell us about yourself and/or something that's of interest to you. You can edit it, add text features and submit to your teacher to show to the class. Here is a sample of a student’s video. You don’t need to watch the entire video to get the idea.
 
2. Another option is to use a website called Screencastify. It is just one of many options for programs (Explain Everything is another) that will allow you to capture your voice and what you’re doing on your screen at the same time. This “screen capture” is saved as a separate video file and can be viewed later and used in other projects.

Watch the following video to check out how you might be able to use Screencastify.