Presentation tips and advice

I'd say bring a bucket of candy and give people rewards when they can answer a question correctly or say something insightful. Rewards like that always worked for me during presentations in uni.

Use only cool, entertaining, relevant photography in your presentation. No text shall appear on-screen. And make sure the photos either appear to reinforce your point, or is in reaction to it. This works to focus everyone on what you are saying. And use humor when appropriate.

It helps if you're geniunely interested, passionate and knowledgeable about the spoken topic. I've always been most interested in speeches and lectures given by people who believe in what they're talking about. No idea how to attain or channel this, but it's worth keeping in mind.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-09/st_pechakucha.

Do NOT read your notes or powerpoint slides to the audience. The more you can speak extemporaneously, the more engaging you will be. Practice until you can do this smoothly and naturally. Oh, and talk about something interesting, that always helps.

Perhaps you can try to use some interesting metaphors and analogies? These usually work because people are stunned out of their slumber when you start talking about pumpkins instead of child labour, and are therefore tuned in when you draw the metaphor that makes your point. For example, I've got to give a presentation in a couple of weeks for the end of my honours year, and I've taken three key points and made up metaphors for beer, sex, and television. Even if they're asleep for the in depth science bit, I'm hoping they'll wake up when I talk about sex and at least hear the take home message.

Include a couple of stories. It might sound lame, but people love a story. I'm taking public speaking course at the moment and aside from other tips already offered above, including a narrative or two is the only help I can offer. Try to find a story that relates a point you're trying to make. It would be great if it was a true story, but if you need to invent a scene and characters, go for it. Good luck.

Tricks I've seen: - "Good morning." "What? I said: good morning." (This sounds totally obnoxious, but someone did it at a conference on Friday with such a smile that it woke up the crowd and got them smiling too.) - "Let's have a show of hands. How many of you out there are from X? Okay, from Y?" These could just be easy categories to assess who is in your audience ("from nonprofits," "from businesses"). Better is to use this to make a point, like "from businesses that try to be ethical and green," "that succeed in being ethical and green;" "that are not only ethical and green, but are also profitable." - "Turn to your neighbor and tell them _______ [eg, what your company's biggest challenge is in trying to go green]. You have one minute to tell your neighbor, then they have one minute to tell you. Ready, go. ... Okay, switch. ... Great. Hold those thoughts. I'm going to tell you waht I think are some of the biggest problems, and then you tell me what I've missed. ..... Okay, now I'm going to tell you some solutions to these. ... Okay, before we go, let's take two more minutes to see what we've learned. Remember the challenge you said before? Turn to your neighbor and tell them one concrete step you can do to begin overcoming the challenge you told them about in the beginning."

To give a real good suggestion, I think it would helpful to see even more of the content rather than the general topic. However, I was going to provide an example or two as to how I used to get people to participate. If you need to see the actual slides and the problems I gave to students, feel free to memail I will share my slides. Anyway, I would sometimes present a bit of background and a problem (eg, toxin in teh environment) and ask students to break into pairs/small group, and discuss a solution. Students were only given a few minutes. I would ask students to then volunteer their solutions and kept a tally or list of things that they suggested and addressed it. Another way to do this that I found more enjoyable was to present a brief amt of material (eg, this is the pathway, feedback loop for hormone X) and then presented a disease, symptoms, and ask students to figure out what went wrong from what they just learned about the pathway. I would ask students this by using a multiple choice quesiton and you could then address why B or C was not the right answer if students selected that answer. Some schools may have something called an "ARS" system - remote controls, recorder, and the results can be displayed on a screen. If you try asking multiple choice questions--the system projects the student responses (name not attached, just 80% answered A and 20% answered B); undergraduates seemed to get a kick out of responding and interacting with the remote control system. Believe it or not the same system is used at seminars for teaching materials to doctors, too (although I have primarily seen the system used to probe what doctors know before the talk, not at the end). Anyway, don't know if you can get access to a system like that -- but if you can, it's fun. Good luck.