Aaron Alcott
11-4-2019
Homework 8
One message per slide is all you should have in your presentation. Our eyes are
drawn to moving objects, signaling colors, contrast-rich objects, and large objects size.
You have to make the most important piece of information the largest and the headline
smaller. Use the fancy contrast thingy to highlight important stuff in large blocks. Make
the background dark so you, as the presenter, stand out. Counting and looking at many
objects on a screen takes too long. Use only 6 objects per slide as much as possible.
A presentation should be the opening of a learning conversation. I think that this
is key when giving a presentation! The conversation isn’t verbal on both sides, the
audience should be silent unless asked a question. In my opinion, questions are a good
way to keep your audience engaged during your presentation. If your presentation has
too much on the slides and you just read them, the audience just zones out and it is
hard to get them back.
My EET 1001 teacher just reads off his powerpoint slides and hardly knows the
material. To his credit, I think he might be an ESL person, but when we ask him
questions it seems that he can’t even answer them without reading the slides again.
His slides are poorly designed because they are too cluttered with more than six
elements per slide. Some slides have complex diagrams and he doesn’t even explain
to them.
On the other hand, my MGT 3000 teacher is excellent at presenting slides. She
uses the publisher given slides because she has to make sure she hits everything. In
management class one or two students present on self-selected topics in the chapter.
This way the teacher can just cover the important things the students did not cover.
She uses the powerpoint as an outline for her conversation with the class. I promise not
to use fancy transitions that take minutes of valuable presentation time.
I promise to not distract the audience with flying, zooming, sliding, or spinning text as it
appears on the screen when I am ready to talk about it.
During the oral presentation, I will make sure that I do not have the whole
meaning on the slides. I will expand on what the slides say (in the text sections) by
explaining in just enough depth. I will use visuals in the correct context and describe
them appropriately. I will make my text size correctly matching the importance of the
point (for main points and titles). I will make sure that I watch the audience to see if
they understand what I am saying and provide more explanation on the topic if
necessary.