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Saturday, April 21, 2012

Virtual Round Table - Improving Your Virtual Presentation

Joe McVeigh gave a presentation on how to conduct a successful webinar. He is such a great presenter himself that all I wanted to do was to hear more from him.

Joe's tips are:
1. Don't try to include everything in your talk
2. Engage with your audience: ask them questions and have polls, e.g. find out which part of the world your listeners are from
3. Prepare your presentation and practise it in advance
4. Do something unexpected (to keep your audience awake)
5. Use good body language and eye contact (this is especially important in a webinar)
6. Don't read your speech. Although you can look at the screen of your computer, it is better to follow the chat box rather your own notes
7. Put your camera at your eye level so that your audience can see your face and eyes not details of your nose or forehead
8. Be yourself (whatever that means for you)
9. Get a good microphone (stand-alone) and a pair of earbuds (with headsets you will look like a DJ)
10. Don't be boring (don't bore your audience)
11. Don't talk too fast (this is easy to do if you are nervous)
12. Keep to the time indicated previously (time management is a very important skill)
13. Use visuals effectively
14. Do not put too much information on one slide (a big text puts people off reading it)
15. Use good lighting (have light/lamps on/by both sides of your desk)
16. Make sure the font size you use makes your slides readable (Joe uses font size 16)
17. It is useful to have a moderator who will share the links presented, keep an eye on the questions from your audience and will put all that and the key points of the presentation in the 'note' area
18. Use Flickr or FreeDigitalPhotos to find pictures for your presentation (check the copyright for pictures you choose and acknowledge the photographer or add the link to the photo in a less obtrusive place of the image itself)

Joe also recommended some books and sites to us:

Garr Reynolds's books PresentationZen and The Naked Presenter and his website.

The Virtual Presenter - the website and the book by Roger Courville

and...

Brain Rules for Presenters

4 comments:

  1. Dear Anna
    I'm sure this was a great workshop. I finished reading your post about Joe McVeigh's presentation at the VRT, and I think you followed all the steps he suggested, and maybe more ... though yours was not virtual, and I know you had to deal with no internet access. Congrats friend. Now, I must go, I'm going to play Enercities.
    Hugs
    Debbie

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  2. Thank you Debbie! Enercities is a great game. My students loved it too. One of my groups is playing it at the moment to report back next week. ;)

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  3. Good tips! I agree visuals are crucial and I also like it when the presenter speaks to the audience rather than reading notes. Thanks Anna!

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  4. You are welcome Barbara! I think in the future most of us will be involved in online teaching this way or another. I hope the blog posts will help us all. :)

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