My recent example: PJHiggins of Chalkdust discusses in "The key to Moving People is Moving People" his attendance in Deborah Estes “Brain-Friendly Presentation Skills.” Really, I think we know these techniques but we forget them as we present. Maybe we forget them also when we teach students.
He questions:
What strategies were successful for us when we stood in front of students and helped them make sense of information? What can we take from our time in the classroom and make it work for us as presenters?
What I take from this:
- Greet everyone who enters by shaking hands and addressing them by name. (Note to self: I will need to be early for this - 30 min. is mentioned!)
- Keep your bio brief and limit the credentials by connecting with the experiences of all those in the audience.
- Use storytelling to make connections to what you want to say.
- Shake it up by doing something else than lecture. Don't fall back to safe. Find out what they know and move on from there. Also focus on reflection.
- Move people around.
Some examples of what we did:
- Moved to another seat
- Turned and talked
- Four corners of the room (body voting)
- Invented names
- Hand voting (raise your hand and think of a number, use your fingers to represent the number, then find someone else in the room who has that number. When you do, discuss the topic with them).
- People bingo
- Touch blue (simply walk around the room and touch something blue)
- Take your neighbor for a walk around the room while discussing the topic at hand.
I am getting ready to present wiki teaching at the One to One Conference at Penn State. This is my second time presenting at a conference. The first time was a dialogue about writing across the curriculum in a small panel (no technology 13 years ago).
My plan now - use the wiki with the participants as the collaborators in order to teach the use of the wiki. I can use the ideas above for grouping the participants initially, showing them the collaborative nature of the wiki by using collaboration. Now off to formulate my plans, prompts, etc. to create an engaging, interactive presentation.
Tags: Technorati Tags: presentation, deborahestes, ascd08, ascd, brainresearch, pjhiggins
Louise, thanks for sharing these presentation tips. It is interesting that so many people don't do in a presentation the sorts of things that we would regularly do in our own classrooms. It's the fear factor I guess :)
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