Developing Effective Presentation Slide Decks

Condensed Reference e-Guide

. . . And Making them Social 1

Developing Effective Presentation Slide Decks If we remain attached to our past, we can’t learn anything new. --Garr Reynolds PowerPoint can be a powerful tool for communicating concepts and ideas. So, what’s up with all the criticism of it these days? Why do we see slide shows titled, Death by PowerPoint? Why do you suppose there’s 5,000 presentations on Slideshare devoted to PowerPoint? When’s the last time you saw a PowerPoint presentation that stuck with you -one that made a difference in how you think about or do your work? Once upon a time trainers and presenters were excited about and happy with this tool (software) called, PowerPoint. It came with built-in templates for font type and size, structure, color and backgrounds and made the job of preparing a presentation much quicker than preparing overheads. All we had to do was open a template, add our data, pop in a few pieces of clip art and, like magic, done. We could even print the slides as handout too. But over time, the new became status quo. Then several things changed. Not so much with the software but with other related capacities that expanded what was possible to accomplish. Storage capabilities increased dramatically. Bandwidth increased. Creative Commons came along for free images and illustrations. Further, the research on learning, especially virtual learning, got much better and the reality of the power of stories came to the forefront. Together, the learning landscape has shifted. It’s time for us to learn some new ways to communicate with participants better - in ways that engage, touch the emotions, and are memorable. The problem isn’t actually with PowerPoint as a software application but more about how we’ve grown accustomed to using it. We were limited for so long that we fell into a rut. I’m guilty - I confess. I have not only subjected audiences to bullet points and clip art but I’ve also taught others to make this same fatal mistake. But no more. There are better ways.

A breath of fresh air While PowerPoint software hasn’t changed all that much, what we’ve learned about learning and the brain has changed ... a lot. Current thinking is pushing us far beyond our former practices into new ones that facilitate communications and learning. More and more web-based learning, training and presentations (webinars, courses) are

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available in real time and recorded for use anytime. Rich learning platforms are emerging enabling us to be more intentional about developing slides that communicate - that tell a story. Visuals are becoming more available and affordable including nocost creative commons licensed images, illustrations, video and audio. PowerPoint integrates these widely available multimedia elements.

One more step ... into Social Media

In times past our PowerPoint slides have been primarily for the face-to-face (F2F) environment - mostly conferences and events. The alternative for sharing the slides was to provide the slides in the form of a handout or send them out as an email attachment. The latter opened up issues like storage, file size and bandwidth. Email attachments take up a lot of space - even more when we think about how many email servers hold the message and attachments plus recipients often download the file to their own hard drive. Then there’s the problem of finding the file months later, right? Social media is changing that. Social Media is the collection of web-based sites that encourage participation and people-generated content e.g., Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Technology advances, among other things, have made putting slides online easy and often free. Once online we can be our own distributors by placing a link in an email (so there’s no attachment) or embedding the slides on websites, blogs and social networks. Web-based applications like Slideshare (www.slideshare.net) and Sliderocket (www.sliderocket.com) or Scribd (www.pdfcoke.com) make sharing slide decks AND handouts easy. Basic accounts are free. One “green” side effect is that far less printed material is needed and people have more access and availability online to remix into new creations.

A few things we’ve learned about the brain, learning and presenting

This e-guide condenses the wisdom of several resources. The idea is to support developing more effective slide decks by including research and best practices from virtual learning, communications. marketing and design. Our brains are wired for novelty. We notice things that are unusual or surprising. Bullet points are anything but novel. And yet with standard PowerPoint, by design, we are encouraged to use bullet points. Luckily, you can also insert images, video, and even flash files into PowerPoint. Our working memory can only process a limited amount of information. When we have a lot of text on a slide we are contributing to what Ruth Colvin Clark refers to as cognitive load. Cognitive load is basically how hard our working memory has to work to learn. It can come from the level of difficulty of the content, the way it is organized or displayed and the mental processes required to reach a learning goal. 3

The brain processes visuals immediately. As it turns out, the brain is primed for visual learning -- images enter the right brain directly, reducing cognitive load. A picture really does express a 1,000 words. Further, the right brain touches our emotions. Why is this important? We connect with and remember content better when it touches us emotionally. Research shows that relevant visuals dramatically improve learning - up to 89% improvement in recall and transfer. Text, when used, should be placed within the visual or immediately next to the visual. By doing so the brain associates the visuals and words together and doubles the opportunity for learners to build a mental model Complex visuals are learned best using audio rather than text. In other words, when you have a really complicated visual talk it through, layer the complexity, describe it. When posting complex visuals online, record and post an audio description too rather than relying solely on written text. Come up with a theme for your presentation but stay away from the standard templates (status quo). Since each presentation and each audience is different you’ll want to adjust to fit each. Just remember to keep it simple, clean and uncluttered. Learning objectives are best presented in text. Make your charts and graphs as simple and clean as you can so that the data you want noticed gets noticed. Resist the urge to insert images behind the graphs or charts as they clutter the slide and the mind. You want these things to pop! When choosing a background it is best to use a light background and dark text since the reverse tends to washout. Always test your color combinations prior to showing them, if you can, as not all colors remain as true through an LCD projector as they appear on your computer screen. Sans Serif fonts are best e.g., Arial, Tahoma, Verdana or even Gill Sans. Stay away from Serif fonts like Times New Roman as these are harder to read on-screen. Save the Serif fonts for printed text. Always make the sure the font size is large enough to be read from the back of the the room for face-to-face presentations. Online, you can use slightly smaller fonts but no smaller than 28. Strategic redundancy - this doesn’t mean saying the same thing over and over again but saying the same thing in different ways so it gets encoded into the different parts of the brain. Key points can be made in several ways to make them more sticky.

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Use concepts and pictures in unexpected ways. Remember the brain craves novelty so do the unusual or unexpected like using cartoons or metaphors to communicate the ideas. In what way does the concept you are representing resemble something else that is more common among participants? Use emotional content. This doesn’t necessarily mean emotional in terms of tears. What it does mean is anything that causes participants to feel something, whether laughter, surprise, empathy, satisfaction, vindication, hope, excitement, etc. Touching the emotions makes content memorable. If you use words with pictures, put the words within or immediately next to the image. Research shows having the text in or near the image helps learners be twice as likely to solve problems related to the content (Freeman/Freeman). Limit transitions and animation. When using these choose the most simple and least intrusive and try to stay with no more than 2-3 types of transitions. Even though it can be easily accomplished, there is no need to put a transition on every slide. Use a personal, conversational style, tell a story in casual language rather than lecturing. Two things are important about this. First, some studies show students performed up to 40% better on post-learning tests when the content was spoken directly, in first person conversational style rather than via lecture. Second, when the brain thinks its engaged in a conversation it pays better attention since there is anticipation of responding. Use questions, not the simple yes/no type but questions that trigger curiosity, discovery, movement and action (Vogt). The brain wants to answer questions so it engages and gets curious when challenged. Use exercises, thought-provoking questions and whole brain activities. The brain remembers things you do better than things you simply read. Get participants attention - and then work to keep it. Our brains pay attention to things that are unusual, unexpected so keep the element of surprise handy. Lead up to a point, an assumption, and then ... disarm it. Use stories and activities that demonstrate more than one point of view. This is a place where cultural differences and similarities can weave into creating greater meaning for everyone. Stories and activities are a powerful way to connect people and create shared meaning. Use images of people when you can - participants are people, right? There’s nothing like connecting to a human face. Sometimes the faces of other creatures like dogs or cats have an appeal and connection. Other creatures doing 5

seemingly human things creates surprise, interest and interpretation. When presenting, plan to seek feedback from participants, often. Don’t wait until you’ve presented for 15 minutes or worse an entire hour! People’s attention, unless deeply engaged, will be gone in only a few minutes. So ask for feedback, in some way, every 3-6 minutes. Presentation in conversational style is engaging and appreciated. Remember, your job is much more than content delivery. Just because a presenter delivers the content doesn’t mean the learner grasped and integrated it into his/her way of thinking. It takes more than simply delivering the content just like there’s more to learning than teaching and more to chocolate cake than simply serving it - at some point we pick up the fork and dig in. Presenting content is a matter of communication - two-way communication. And communication is all about the transfer of emotions (Godin). As a presenter, our job is to find a way to communicate the concepts so it helps others become as excited as we are about the topic. Go analog when beginning to prepare for a presentation (Reynolds). Rather than begin by sitting down at the computer and starting to develop a slide deck, it is a better idea to “go analog” i.e., start with brainstorming and organizing thoughts using sticky notes or newsprint. Once the ideas are out in front of us where we can work with them, it is easier to organize and sequence them. Offer your slides to others using social media. By posting your slides online in locations like Slideshare or Sliderocket you can not only send participants a link to the slides, you can also embed the slides on a website or blog. Further, your participants can do the same meaning they can write about the workshop and what they learned spreading the learnings. Further, the location of the slides can also be “bookmarked” and tagged on del.icio.us or furl, making them available in yet another way to another group of people in a network.

Where to find photos/images for your slides:

•Flickr (www.flickr.com) has a collection of creative commons photos at www.flickr.com/creativecommons •Peter Shanks hosts creative commons photos at http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/? terms=community&edit=yes&page=1. •istockphoto.com at www.istockphoto.com (reasonable cost, low resolution as little as $1 each). •photos.com at www.photos.com, annual subscription $129 per year. •For a list of more photo/image sites (across all price ranges) go to: •http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/01/where_can_you_f.html 6

Examples of image-based slideshows Shift Happens http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/shift-happens-33834 If Information is Like Water (1) http://www.slideshare.net/Unwired/information-is-like-water-part-2 Information is Like Water (2) http://www.slideshare.net/Unwired/information-is-like-water The Web is Evolving http://www.slideshare.net/Unwired/the-web-is-evolving-presentation Technology for/and/by the Community http://www.slideshare.net/choconancy/technology-forandby-community Nonprofits, Healthcare and Social Media http://www.slideshare.net/kanter/nonprofits-healthcare-and-socialmedia

A Word About Creative Commons Copyleft

In many cases in prevention we want people to take what we offer and use it rather than have our work rigidly copyright protected. Up until recently there’s not been a way to grant copyright easily. One way to help others use our work in the ways we want is to use Creative Commons copyright, or copyleft as it is sometimes called. What Creative Commons does is let you tell others how you’d like your material used. Licensing runs the continuum from full copyright to public domain. For example, this document is Creative Commons licensed with attribution, non-commercial, share-alike. This means that anyone can use the content, change it, even mash it up, as long as the resulting document isn’t sold and is shared under the same license. For more on Creative Commons visit http://creativecommons.org. For a short six minute video about how Creative Commons works see the YouTube video, Creative Commons-Wanna Work Together? at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhimdwoWM5A

References & Resources:

1. Clark, R. (2007). The New Virtual Classroom. John Wiley & Sons: CA 2. Freeman, E. & Freeman, E. (2004). Head First Design Patterns. O’Reilly Media, Inc: CA 3. Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Random House: NY 4. Reynolds, G. (2008). Presentation Zen. New Riders, Berkeley: CA 5. Godin, S. (2008). Tribes. Portfolio: NY 6. Kapterev, Alexei. Death by PowerPoint (and how to fight it) http://www.slideshare.net/ahmad1957/deathbypowerpoint4344presentation 7. Vogt, E., Brown, J., Isaacs, D. (2003). The Art of Powerful Questions: Catalyzing Insight, Innovation and Action. Available online at http://www.theworldcafe.com/articles/aopq.pdf 8. For a series of tips, tutorials, links and resources visit http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/index.html 9. To post your slides online consider, Slideshare, Sliderocket or Scribd.

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Creative Commons Photo Citations

Presenter: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maynard/3060792538/ Presentation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwhitlock/1422242668/ Graph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/macanthony/743664106/ Surprised monkey: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fncll/135465557/ Social media wheel: http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/2735401175/ Wizard of Oz: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kiddocone/2518625986/ Graph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/macanthony/743664106/ Shift Happens: http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/shift-happens-33834 Laughter: www.flickr.com/photos/54289096@N00/1934009763 Conversation: www.flickr.com/photos/47207654@N00/47651477 Advice: www.flickr.com/photos/13619351@N06/2440923023 Children’s discussion: www.flickr.com/photos/68467272@N00/251503706 All other photos belong to the author or were purchased from istockphoto.com This Guide is licensed under Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Attribution: LaDonna Coy, MHR, CPS, CDLA, Learning for Change, Inc. Blogging at http://technologyinprevention.blogspot.com

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