Pre-Workshop Videos & Activities
This workshop is primarily hands-on practice creating a persuasive presentation using either PowerPoint or Google Slides. To participate fully please do the following before the workshop, which should take you 30-35 minutes:
Can Death By PowerPoint Be Avoided?
By the end of this workshop, you will be able to explain to your friends why reading densely packed PowerPoint slides is ineffective, along with why a number of other PowerPoint “sins” should be avoided if you want to make persuasive and memorable presentations. Let’s start to learn about some of these sins to avoid by watching an excellent TEDx video that tells some stories about awful PowerPoint slides and then models the use of several techniques, based on multimedia learning principles, that we can use to make our presentations more engaging and persuasive.
- An interactive TEDx talk by David JP Phillips: How to avoid death By PowerPoint (19 min)
Can Storytelling Make Your Presentation More Memorable?
Storytelling is a powerful teaching tool. That said, we should never forget to put related and well-constructed stories in our persuasive presentations. Note how Don McMillan, in the following video, tells a series of funny stories to help him make his key points memorable in his, Life After Death by PowerPoint presentation.
Nayomi Chibana has some excellent suggestions for effective storytelling techniques for presentations. Think of ways you could incorporate some of the techniques she covers into the presentation you will make as part of this workshop. Below are the main points from Nayomi’s article on storytelling in presentations: 1. Immerse your audience in a story 2. Tell a personal story 3. Create suspense 4. Bring characters to life 5. Show. Don’t tell 6. Build up to a S.T.A.R. moment 7. End with a positive takeaway
OPTIONAL - If you’d like to go deeper on public speaking, and explore whether or not you should be reading your presentations, or doing more ad libbing, listen to this wonderful podcast by Tim Harford while you go for a walk (or at your computer if you like). In this episode Tim tells two stories. The first is about a public speaking failure that ended the career of a business leader, and the second speech by Martin Luther King Jr. that has become one of the most famous in the English language. Tim is a wonderful storyteller, and these two stories are entertaining, engaging, and thought provoking. In short, this podcast is a great example of educational storytelling, and a wonderful learning object.