Put the Power in Your PowerPoint Presentations

I developed Put the Power in Your PowerPoint Presentations for an in-service for my agency. As a member of the Distance Learning team, I accepted the challenge to do this since this is an area in which I’ve done extensive reading and research. However, this is truly my first attempt at putting all of that great information into practice for a live presentation that I’m delivering. I combined information from various sources for the content, including Richard Mayer, Garr Reynolds and Cliff Atkinson.

The presentation is actually tomorrow and I still have quite a bit of practicing to do. I really wanted to be able to deliver this without notes, but I don’t see that happening since I haven’t put in as much time as I’d need to for that to be a reality.

As I’ve studied the great presenters out there, the many on TED, Garr Reynolds and Merlin Mann, I aspire to one day, deliver a talk with the conversational ease that they do. I’ve had lots of training in a more formal style and I looks like I won’t be able to make an overnight transformation, but it is something that I’m practicing.

Here’s the handout that’s referenced toward the end.

In the context of website marketing, I have advocated that businesses use SlideShare to establish themselves as an expert and increase incoming links.

Here’s the thing…as I say in my presentation, if you design your slides correctly–for a live audience–they shouldn’t be able to stand alone. So, putting a presentation that you give on SlideShare “as is” won’t be helpful for anyone viewing it. What you may, or may not, notice about the best SlideShare presentations (check out the contest winners’ presentations to see what I mean by this), is that they mimic a storybook. They use large fonts and visuals with very few words (part of a sentence) per slide. Each page is part of an ongoing story. Some presentations may have as many as 50 slides. As I mention in my presentation, this is not a problem. When you view a presentation on SlideShare, you are clicking through very rapidly. You can probably read a 50 slide presentation in 2 minutes.

Try it with the winner of the 2009 SlideShare’s World’s Best Presentation Contest…

The next time you deliver a presentation live, try out my suggestions and then give yourself some time and post a different version–more like a storybook–on SlideShare. Don’t forget to include a link back to an article on your website!

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