A Couple of Tips.

Over the past twenty five years, I've had the chance to participate in and plan several presentations. what I'm going to include in today's blog entry are a couple of things that will help out the novice presenter.

1. Too many words on a slide
The simple adage, k.i.s.s., holds true in this case; keep it simple stupid. When presenting, specifically with PowerPoint, novice presenters tend to put every single word on the slide that they intend to say. This makes for a very predictable presentation and often confuses the audience which will spend more time looking at all of the details to every single slide insted of paying attention to what the presenter has to say. If key topics or talking points are highlighted in a simple way, the audience will glance at the slide and continue to liste.
2. Do not read the slides
Again this happens quite often with novice presenters. If a person reads the slides word for word, it makes for a very predictable presentation and lulls the audience into complete boredom. It is best to highlight the key points on the slide and then explain them in greater detail. This way, the presenter is engaging the audience and keeping the attention on him or her. However, one must be extremely careful when taking this approach to stay away from the dreaded "um" monster. When there is more flexibility in a presentation this terrible creature likes to show his ugly head in the breaks and pauses. He has been known to show himself during some presentation over 20 times! Please be careful.

Of course there are many things that we were unable to discuss today that go into an effective presentation. I hope that my two "pointers" will help someone avoid these preventable pitfalls and assist them on his or her way to an effective presentation.

In response to Collaboration Technology

This blog entry is in response to Bryan Mortenson's blog entry about collaboration technology used in the classroom. I thought the entry was well written and explained a lot of the applications
that are currently used when we talk about collaboration technology. Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, are several among an entire sea of social media applications. When they are used for good, they can be powerful tools in allowing team members and classmates to coordinate tasks and complete projects from different locations. The "dark side" to these applications of collaboration technology is that when used irresponsibly, can be the cause of many hours of wasted time that could have been better spent elsewhere. As I write this, I have fallen victim to the grasp of facebook which has enthralled me for the past hour. Have I spent my time wisely on facebook? Yes and no. It is extremely useful in contacting friends and associates, but because I had a little bit of free time on my hands I spent more time "collaborating" than I should have. New technologies have enabled students to collaborate and work more effectively now more than ever, however with the good is also the bad. The bad being the increased amount of distractions that take away from study time.