Multimedia Presentation Tips

The purpose of this presentation is to help you design and present an effective presentation.

You Know you have given a successful presentation when the answer to the question, "Has the audience come away from this with information that was in-line with the original point of the presentation?" is a resounding “YES!”

Be sure to clearly state your purpose at the beginning of your presentation. The overall goal of a presentation is to get your point across to your audience in a clear and concise manner.

Use your slideshow as a guided outline for your speech. It is meant to highlight the main points of your lecture, not to be the lecture in and of itself.

Animation and graphics are good, when used appropriately. They should be used to set off a specific point or fact that you want the audience to pay close attention to.

Passing Out handouts at the end of your presentation, will give the audience a hardcopy pf your important point. This eliminates the need for the audience to take notes, thereby, leaving them free to focus solely on the presentation.

Short bulleted points are easier to read than long statements. People should be listening to you, not reading long statements off the screen.

When you are giving a presentation, there are several things you need to watch out for.

You do not want overwhelm your audience with too much information, because you want your audience to be focusing on your points, not to be sorting through the information trying to find your point.

Also, you want the pictures to have relevance to the presentation. Using “generic” clip art makes for a “generic” presentation. Thirdly, “Bells and whistles are great when seldom used, but too many and your presentation losses credibility.

Before you present, you must plan your presentation. The remainder of this slide show will help you to address planning issues.

The first step in planning a PowerPoint presentation is deciding how you are going to present it. “If you plan on using a computer and a projection system to do a slide show,” Be sure that you are in a location that is equipped with the proper hookups and connections. The software installed on the computers in the classroom must be able to support running the presentation, or “if you will be bringing a laptop computer you must make sure you have all of the necessary cables and drivers to connect to the system.”

You will need to choose some form of software on which to design your presentation. The most commonly used is a version of Microsoft PowerPoint, but there are others.

The next consideration you must address is the time and money involved in presenting your project. The cost of copying color transparencies can be costly. ”Just printing a full presentation on a color laser printer can take up to an hour due to large file size, and at $1.40 for each color transparency in campus computer labs.” The expense of your project can become overwhelming. “Purchase a box of laser-printer transparency film that is appropriate to your printer if you plan to do a lot of this type of printing.”

You are your best critic. Take the time to view your presentation from the perspective of the students. Is the presentation interesting? Can the presentation be easily seen, or does the lighting or seating arrangement need to be changed, in order to provide students with a better view?

Although using a lot of colors or animations may seem entertaining, over utilizing these particular features, “can become tiring or annoying to viewers. The objective is to create a visually pleasing look and feel. If done correctly, the color scheme will “add to the content, not distract from it. Use consistent color schemes and formatting conventions across the slides of your presentation.

Use animated graphics and images only when illustrating concepts. Overusing graphics shifts the focus and detracts from your presentation. Also, “when projected on a large screen, a small image will appear quite large.” This distorts the images, making them fuzzy. ”Poor image quality will be particularly noticeable and may detract from your presentation.”

Do Students have access to the presentation? Many students may not have home computers, or the computers they own may not have internet access. Those students who do have access to the internet from home, may have trouble downloading larger image files, depending on the age of their computers, and the speed of their internet connections. Therefore, keep images to as small a size as possible.

When presenting to an unfamiliar Audience, Always consider the needs of the visually impaired. You should use a large font type because there is always a possibility that someone in the group has low vision. People afflicted with low vision require high contrast between the background and the font color. Not everyone sees the same colors well. So, If someone does mention that they are visually impaired, Ask them which two colors they see best together, and change the font and color scheme accordingly. Also, remove all unnecessary graphics, busy backgrounds and all other visual distractions, so that the individual does not mistake them for words that should be focused on.