Presentation

A few weeks ago I made a presentation to the staff at uni. The glass half full version is that I learnt a lot about what not to do. The glass half empty version is that it didn’t go very well.

Things I found out:

• Less points is better
  I had about 40 slides prepared and had time to get through less than 10
• Less words on screen & more in my notes
  I had quite a few slides which were dot points or quotes. Since I had them up on screen I felt weird about just reading them out and got muddled. Next time I will use mostly images or examples on screen and use the dot points and quotes in my notes.
• Less explaining – more referring
  Looking back I didn’t quite know what the audience would be like and who I should target my presentation to. I made the mistake of trying to explain a whole lot of my background research when I should have been focussing on the implications of these ideas on my work and just referring to them in brief.
• Again – Less points
  The focus of my presentation should have been what my work is about, why it is important and so on. These were going to be my last points that I was building to…. before I ran out of time. They should have been my first points.
• Dual monitoring is a bad idea
  I should have used video mirroring on my laptop rather than the dual monitor output. When I was preparing things to move to the projector display the audience had nothing to look at. I ended up leaving error messages etc on the screen without knowing it. It is much better to show the audience what you are doing
• Keynote / Powerpoint presentations are not very flexible
  When I got the ‘five minutes left’ warning I realised how fixed and linear my slideshow was, there was no quick way for me to jump to my last points and I ended up trying to summarise the other points as I went through them.

I’m sure I’ll think of some others to note down.