REBEL Cast Ep 45: How to Build a Great Presentation

What’s Wrong With Lectures/Presentations Now?

• Lecturing style has remained stagnant despite the fact that our understanding of how people learn has changed.
• Most presentations make the supportive media (i.e. slides) the focus of the presentation without thought about the story or the delivery.
• Lectures are too focused on the educator instead of focusing on the needs of the learner.

Episode 45 – How to Build a Great Presentation

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So Why is it so Important to Lecture Well?

• Lecture is ubiquitous and not going anywhere, so if we are going to do it, we might as well do it well
• “Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.” Marshall McLuhan

3 Parts to Any Good Lecture/Argument:

• Aristotle
  • Ethos (Credibility/Expertise)
  • Pathos (Emotion)
  • Logos (Logic)
• Ross Fisher
  • The Story
  • The Supportive Media
  • The Performance

8 Steps to Developing a Great Presentation:

• Step 1 – Become Inspired by the Great Speakers
  • Victoria Brazil (@SocraticEM)
  • Scott Weingart (@emcrit)
  • Ross Fisher (@ffolliet)
  • Ted Talks
• Step 2 – Create a Narrative/Story That You are Passionate About
  • What about the topic makes your heart sing?
  • “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Steve Jobs
• Step 3 – Brainstorming (Get Ideas Out of Your Head)
  • Ditch the computer and go analog (pad and pencil)
  • What frees your mind? (i.e. Exercise, Notepads, Index Cards, Post it Notes, Mind Maps)
• Step 4 – Crafting Your Message
  • What are the critical things your learners need to take away from your presentation
  • What is your core message (The crux of your talk)
  • 2 – 4 teaching points that revolve around your core message (This depends on the length of your talk: 15 min, 30 min, 60 min)
  • Essentially in this step you can summarize your talk in 2 – 3 sentences (i.e The Elevator Pitch)
• Step 5 – Building Your Presentation Skeleton
  • Developing a flow to your talk (i.e. Storyboarding, Writing an Outline)
  • Can do this analog or digital (I.e. PowerPoint, Keynote etc)
  • At the end of this process you have a slide deck of nothing but empty slides with presenter notes identifying the details/point of each slide
• Step 6 – Fill Up Your Slides (Creation of Your Supportive Media)
  • Start filling slides with hi-resolution images, not lines and lines of text
  • Reading from a PowerPoint slide is not the same thing as teaching
  • Our minds cannot process audio and visual content at the same time, but given the choice we tend to read instead of listen
  • Some Sites with Hi-Resolution Images:
    • Flickr
    • Pixabay
    • Pexels
    • Unsplash
    • Freepik
    • Pikwizard
• Step 7 – Rehearse and Practice Your Talk
  • “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Bruce Lee
  • Focus on the introduction and conclusion of your talk because these are the most memorable for the audience
  • Practice until you are comfortable with the information in a talk (i.e. Imagine the power goes out and you have to give your presentation without your slides)
  • You don’t have to practice the talk from beginning to end, you can actually practice chunks of your talk at a time before doing the full rehearsal
• Step 8 – Seek and Get Feedback on Your Talk
  • Bounce ideas off friends (i.e. Buddy System)
  • Record yourself speaking and give it a listen or ask a friend to listen
  • Have someone in the audience who you trust to give you specific feedback on your talk (i.e. delivery, performance, slides, etc…)
  • In smaller group formats, hand out index cards and after the talk have the audience write 3 things they learned from your talk.  Then see if there is harmony between what your teaching points and what the learner took away

Websites/Textbooks Mentioned During the Podcast:

1. P Cubed Presentations – p1 (The Story), p2 (The Supportive Media, p3 (The Delivery)
2. Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
3. Keynotable

Post Peer Reviewed By: Salim R. Rezaie (Twitter: @srrezaie)