Claudia's Blog: Week Eight

Lecture Summary

Since it's a given that throughout our university years we will be required to make oral presentations, the lecture outlined what we should and shouldn't do in order to deliver good quality oral presentations. It began by showing a youtube video on 'Death by Powerpoint', where a standup comedian makes fun of all the common errors people make when using powerpoint in their speeches. The lecture then followed with suggestions on how to structure our presentations correctly within a basic frame of an Introduction, Body, and Conclusion, in order to produce an effective result. Using powerpoint was also the main theme of the lecture, and it mentioned an important basic rule to comply with when using it; KISS, which stands for 'Keep It Simple Stupid'. This point takes us back to the opening youtube video that shows us people tend to overload their powerpoints with too much, all too often. Further points that the lecture made was that slides should be used for illustrative purposes and to summarize the key points of what you're talking about, and also most important of all, making sure that everything is relevant.

Tutorial Tasks

Five good strategies for a top-notch presentation:

Organise your talk around a central theme, and make sure that when trying to make your point it doesn't get lost in detail.

With slide presentations: use a minimum amount of flashy graphics or none at all, as this tends to distract the audience; keep text in slides short, prefferably one or two sentences so that the audience can still folow what you're saying.

Be outgoing so that the audience thinks that you are enjoying giving them the presentation--If you don't seem interested in what you're saying, then the audience wont be interested in what you're saying either. As James Hayes Bohanan suggests, humour may even be used occasionally to keep the audience's interested.
Don't make the speech too long as the concentration span of the audience may only be around ten minutes, and making it short also leaves time for questions.

Practise and come prepared. Practise is the key--If you don't practise beforehad it will be more nerve-wrecking when you're giving the presentation as you're more likely to make mistakes that you haven't had time to correct.

Powerpoint Presentation:

Here are the six slides of the Powerpoint presentation I made on 'What not to do'.