Making your PowerPoint Presentation Interesting

People say they hate PowerPoint presentations. This is not news. Nor is it news that what they really hate are uninteresting PowerPoint presentations. You know the one's that rely on the standard PowerPoint template and only use the bullet point outlines to organize their presentation.

How Does One Improve their PowerPoint Presentation?

First, buy some books and attend some trainings (F2F or IRL) on how to make your PowerPoint slides more interesting. Check out some simple graphic design books too! One of the best tips I found was to create your own photos and clipart. When you are using your own images you don't have to worry about copyright infringement or your participants connecting your images to some other text in their heads.  For example, recently I was working on revising a presentation that discussed special education teams. The photos for the slides looked like this:

I'm concerned that this may result in some cognitive dissonance. As a curriculum designer and presenter I know that my participants are learning new vocabulary and trying to shift their thinking on certain preconceived notions. Thus I don't want cutesy pictures either. I want to be mindful that a picture of a boys baseball team might make people think of winning--there is no "winning" in special education, teams aren't competing, they are working collaboratively, no one team member is more important than another.  I also don't want families to think, "my child will never play on a team like this."  I don't think this is over-thinking things, you may however, disagree.  I'm thinking I may have to get a few friends together, hand out some photo disclosure forms and snap a few pictures.

Pictures Don't Tell the Whole Story

Great design won't make the whole presentation (though it does help). One also needs to know the material and engage the audience. It is important to insure that your intent and your audience's expectations match. If your audience is expecting to share their knowledge, you had better have space in your agenda to let them share their wealth. It is also important to know how to moderate and facilitate the discussion so that one participant doesn't monopolize the conversation. You want your participants to leave your session just like they would leave a great restaurant:  satisfied, yet still wanting more. Rather than handing out doggy bags you can indicate that participants can talk to you after the session if they need more information.

More on Using Webinars to Inform

Preparing to Present

In our last blog posting, we talked about how to develop an engaging webinar. Now let's turn our attention to the next steps for insuring that your webinar is successful. Once you have your presentation prepared, it is important to practice, practice, practice. I personally don't advocate creating a very tight script, but you should have a loose script for each slide. Your audience can tell if you are reading your script, and to be frank, if that's what you are doing, they'd rather you emailed them the script and let them read it.  Decide beforehand how you'l handle the chat.  Will you, as the presenter, scan the chat and read it aloud? Will you have the producer read the questions/comments at certain points during the presentation? You will notice that I have only spoken about how to minimize the cognitive load of the learner--I don't want to scare you, but the cognitive load on the presenter is quite high. So be prepared. I estimate that the load is twice as high as a F2F training. You will be tired--but if your learners enjoyed your session and got a lot out of it it is all worth it.

Preparing for Disaster
OK, that sounds bad, but really, it is important to think about what you will do if the video suddenly crashes, or if the audio isn't working.  I use two computers whenever I am presenting. I log in to one as a moderator and the other as a guest. That way if one suddenly crashes, I can hopefully stay connected via the second one. I prefer using VOIP to present, but will call-in using a phone line in a pinch. You should be very familiar with how to troubleshoot the audio and video before your first webinar. I also print out a copy of my PowerPoint--I lie, I print out two, one has each slide individually, the other has the outline with the trainer notes. I also prefer to give learners a second phone number and email address that will connect them directly with the producer. That way, everyone on the line isn't listening as the producer troubleshoots Susie's problems with her java download. Once I have my redundancies in place, I hope for the best and if the worst happens I try to keep calm and carry on. Remember, your learners won't know if things are not going as planned if you don't let them know!  

Informing Using Webinars

Webinars
Hosting webinars, and recording for later viewing, is another way that we can inform and support families and professionals. But it is important to understand that a webinar is not as simple as taking your current face-to-face presentation and showing it via the internet. All learning requires that the learner take their current knowledge, examine the new information and somehow combine the two. While webinars mean that learners can do this from the comfort of their living rooms, it also means that they have many more distractions--dogs, kids, Facebook, email. You get the picture. But have no fear, there are ways to grab their attention, keep it and inform them! 

Developing Instruction
Think about what your audience wants to learn. How will you help them combine this new knowledge with what they already know? To be useful, your instruction must meet their needs. Do not to overload them--really think through if you need that animation or audio clip.  Balance using the available technology with its usefulness. It is important to base your instruction on how people learn. Thankfully there is plenty of evidenced-based practice in this area. If you have both words and pictures on a page, place your words near the pictures. A separation of words and pictures tells the brain that it is looking at two different ideas. You are already asking the brain to work hard, don't mistakenly ask it to overwork.

Engaging the Learners
One of the advantages of a webinar, or synchronous learning environment, is the interactivity.  You can post a poll, ask people to raise their hands, answer questions using the microphones or in the chat box. If you want your audience to interact, you should begin your session asking folks to answer a question. Where is everyone?  Are they at home? the office? When planning out your presentation think about natural points where you can check in with your learners. This helps them stay engaged. With a webinar you need to be more deliberate than in an face-to-face (F2F) training. In a F2F training you know if the room is with you, against you or asleep! Online, you've got limited ability to see what others are up to--some webinars allow you to "peek" at your learner's desktop--but it seems too "Big Brother" for me! Rather than stalk your learners, make sure you are more engaging than Farmville! One way to prepare participants that you are expecting this to be a two-way interaction is to open the room early, begin to engage with participants using the available technology. I often open up the webinar room a half-hour before the session, which means that my producer (the person who handles all of the technical aspects of the training) and I are "in" the room about an hour before the session.  We have the PowerPoint loaded, we've checked the audio, the call-in line, etc. And we hope, fingers crossed, that we don't have any glitches.

Community of Practice

Professional Development
Another way to inform and support is to create a Community of Practice (COP). As long as the internet has been around, there have been COPs. Sometimes these were accomplished using listserves. A local or national group would create a listserve and invite people they know to join.  In the last few years COPs have migrated to sites like Ning! The T A and D Network, a network of programs funded by OSEP has had COPs for some time and is now using a Ning site as well (You can see more on OSEP here or here). To operate a COP like the one used by TADNET, requires paying the fees required by Ning! and hoping that folks can find your COP, or you can simply join TADNET.