presentation report
what is it?
a sequence of slides or movies to
supplement oral
presentations and as stand-alone presentations
For the live, oral part of presentations
and for resources for
designing and improving presentations, learn more about
presentations
and presentations
as theater.
Wikipedia's
PowerPoint
It is used to guide and reassure a
presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience.
SWOT
Think of a PowerPoint slide as a
billboard. It is best for bold
graphics and activity such as embedded video and sound clips. At its
high end,
PowerPoint can look much like a movie made with Adobe's Premiere.
At its worst, a PowerPoint presentation
has cut-and-paste text
from a report as on the screen shot below. Inexperienced and
unimaginative
presenters stand next to this slide and read the text. They may or may
not have
taken the gum out of their mouths first.
The audience goes cross-eyed. Then they
start yawning. As a
student, your learning curve flattens or dips. Think of an inverse
Golden Rule:
Don't do unto others what you don't
what done unto you.
Over-Reliance On Powerpoint Leads To Simplistic Thinking (no longer available online)
by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas
NewsScan, December 15, 2003
NASA's Columbia Accident
Investigation Board has fingered the agency's over-reliance on
Microsoft PowerPoint presentations as one of the elements leading to
last February's shuttle disaster. The Board's report notes that NASA
engineers tasked with assessing possible wing damage during the mission
presented their findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide so crammed
with bulleted items that it was almost impossible to analyze. "It is
easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint
slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,"
says the report.
NASA's findings are echoed in a pamphlet titled "The Cognitive Style of
PowerPoint," authored by information presentation theorist Edward
Tufte, who says the software forces users to contort data beyond
reasonable comprehension. Because only about 40 words fit on each
slide, a viewer can zip through a series of slides quickly, spending
barely 8 seconds on each one. And the format encourages bulleted lists
-- a "faux analytical" technique that sidesteps the presenter's
responsibility to link the information together in a cohesive argument,
according to Tufte, who concludes that ultimately, PowerPoint software
oozes "an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales
pitch."
PowerPoint
Is Evil
by Edward Tufte
Wired, September 2003
Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts
Absolutely.
Does PowerPoint make you stupid? (no longer available online)
by Tad Simons
Presentations, March 2004
Boredom is the word most often
associated with Microsoft PowerPoint, the world's most popular
presentation-graphics program – but stupid is quickly becoming the
descriptor of choice for the software seemingly everyone loves to hate.
Smart publications disparage PowerPoint with glee these days. In 2001,
The New Yorker published a piece called "Absolute PowerPoint," which
depicted Americans as a growing army of intellectual zombies staring
mindlessly at the screen, waiting for the next inane slide. In
September 2003, The New York Times ran a story called "The level of
discourse continues to slide," which described how a PowerPoint slide
may have contributed to the mistaken conclusion, reached by NASA
engineers last February, that the space shuttle Columbia could safely
re-enter the Earth's atmosphere despite possible damage to its wing
from a falling piece of foam upon takeoff.
If you're going to use
PowerPoint, at least try
to make it interesting. Tell a story. Get some characters. Give them
problems. Move toward a solution to the problem. What Doc Searls
(right) had to say way back in 1998 is even more true today as more
people have learned to use PowerPoint poorly.
It's The
Story,
Stupid
Don't Let Presentation Software Keep You From Getting Your Story Across
by Doc Searls
August 16, 1998
"Click 'finish' to complete your
presentation." But it's not your presentation. It's your version of a
PowerPoint presentation, which is not about what you want to say, but
about how you say it. To quote the manual, "To create presentations,
you write and design slides."
Wrong. Presentations are as much about slides as poetry is about
handwriting. Again, David Ogilvy: "What you say is more important than
how you say it." ...
"The world is full of beautiful presentations that never leave the
screen," Larry says. Why? "Because they're just prosthesis. They're
speakers' notes. Reminders. They exist for the benefit of the speaker,
not the audience. They work so well as a substitute for the Real Thing
that when it's over, the speaker feels like he said something and the
audience feels like something got said; but in reality nothing got
communicated at all. It's all just a simulation. And that's if things
go well. More often than not, all anybody remembers — including the
speaker — is that a bunch of slides got shown."
hardware
projectors and screens
software
Microsoft's PowerPoint
Corel's Show
Open Office's
Impress
- free for the downloading
A fully featured, comprehensive
office suite that integrates
the tools your organization needs to be effective and productive. You
can create
dynamic documents, analyze data, design eye-catching presentations,
collaborate
with team members, publish Web content, send mail, and schedule
appointments -
all in one integrated desktop.
Skills
acquiring,
editing, managing, displaying, and distributing:
text and graphics ("slides")
video and animation ("movies")
If you do use PowerPoint, think of it as a
train full of boxcars (slides) in which you can arrange other media.
example: jeopardy game
example: Lawrence Lessig's (left)
presesentation
on copyright. This is a Flash movie incorporating the audio
of the final presentation he did on this topic. On the OSCON web, you
can download Lessig's original PowerPoint
slide set.
how to: PowerPoint
Heaven
PowerPoint Heaven is a website
providing PowerPoint games, artworks, PowerPoint showcase, animation
templates, PowerPoint animations and tutorials on animating Microsoft
PowerPoint.
Garr Reynold's
Presentation
Zen blog - "on issues related to professional presentations design"
Advice
Best Bet | If you
can use a web or a movie instead of a PowerPoint slide set, do so.
The
images are primary; the words are secondary.
Use
lots of slides.
No
more than ten words per slide. Phrases
only; no complete sentences. Use the words as prompts to talk
about
specific topics, as an outline, not as the substance of the
presentation itself. This tip also means you will never read your
slide to the audience. If there's anything to read, the slide has too
many words.
One
or two strong graphics per
slide. Embed video in some
slides.
Don't
use Microsoft's templates
unless you're forced to.
Hand
out your notes, etc.,
afterwards, not before.
The two most important slides are the
first one and the final one, which will be on the screen before and
after the oral presentation. Think about adding music to them.
homework assignment
Make a slide show with PowerPoint to
accompany an oral presentation that your boss would give to people
important to him/her.
Summarize the main ideas in your report.
Emphasize a couple of highlights. Isolate the key words. Those words
only, as few as possible, should be the only words on your slides. Tell
you story with images.
Spread those words over many slides, although they can
all be piled up on one slide,
concentrating on the images and sounds.
For a long presentation with some repeating elements, make a master slide. View > Master
> Slide master, handout master, notes master
Use transitions between slides. Slide Show
> Slide Transition
Animate the parts of a slide. Slide Show
> Custom Animation
embed
a YouTube video in your presentation -- works only when you are
presenting while online, which is a risky proposition
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modified: November 2011
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/eng260/tools/slides.htm
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