Activity 8.3 Good Presentation Design
How many times have we all sat through “death by PowerPoint” and wished that someone would make it interesting and not kill our attention span with an overload of information? I have to admit that I am guilty of that as well with the presentations I have to give at our call center trainings. I am very good at keeping people interested as I talk telling jokes or short stories and even asking questions but that still doesn’t stop the presentation itself from being boring. My last visit I changed up the slides a bit and was told it was the best training that they have been given. Was it because there were different slides? No, I think it had more to do with my presentation style than anything else. I made something very boring interesting and fun.
Now the question is how do I make a good presentation that will incorporate my personality without compromising the integrity of the information I need to get out there. First, my presentation should be visually appealing…NO BULLETS! What I put in there matters and shouldn’t just be for decoration. Creating a good presentation takes practice and hard work…..learn how to use what you are working with! Get a small audience together who may not know what the content is and do a run through to see if they get what you are trying to convey. Did it make sense to them? Did I overwhelm them with information? Were there too may visuals and not enough information?
A big point that I learned this week is that I need to sketch out my ideas ahead of time. This gives me a chance to see it on paper and what the direction and flow will be. Then when I am putting together my presentation I can change it up if it isn’t working the way I thought it would. By getting your ideas down on paper it keeps you from forgetting the important details. I also now understand that I should only be putting one idea on a slide…cramming it with too many ideas overwhelms the audience and creates a crowded slide with a bunch of words. Sometimes a picture is worth far more than a thousand words.
At the start of this week I thought for sure that I would use prezi.com to make this amazing presentation. I even practiced putting something together and up until last night my plan was prezi.com. Then out of curiosity and a bit of frustration, I opened up PowerPoint and started working within it and discovered so many dynamics to it! Oh the things I can do with it. So once I started working with it and making it my own I realized it delivered a more powerful message than my prezi could. Yes it is cool to be able to zoom in and out but I felt my point was getting lost in the “coolness” of those features.
Where does this leave me now? Will I only ever use PowerPoint? No, I think that with time and practice there are other multimedia tools that I can use to give a great presentation. I am still getting used to using the brain so one thing at a time! Another thing to think about is will my audience be able to benefit from using other media tools? Or will they still get the point as long as I know how to put all the information together in a way that makes sense to them?
No comments:
Post a Comment