21 Presentation Strategies

In this section, we will be discussing how we present content to our learners using technology. Let’s take a few minutes to reflect on teachers in our educational journeys. Do you remember your favorite teacher? Why were they your favorite teacher? What about your worst teacher? What made them your worst teacher? Chances are your favorite teacher engaged you in learning the content, and the worst teacher did not.

The following image of Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience is a tool that can help you design your presentations and assessments (next section). This is easier when presenting in a classroom because you can add authentic active learning into the class time. In a traditional classroom, you have a captive audience; it is easy to see what is working and what is not and change your teaching style on the fly. You must captivate your audience during the presentation stage in an online classroom. In the classroom, 7 minutes is the average time for the audience to lose interest in a good presentation. So, it is important to think about ways to bring their attention back to you. This isn’t as easy when creating online lectures, and you must take extra steps to make them as engaging as possible. This includes fewer words on the screen and more images. Not reading word for word from the slide since the average reader reads faster than you speak and will be done with the slide’s text before you finish your first point. You should also keep videos short; best practices are around 3-10 minutes. This is where chunking content and building short videos that build on each other come into play.

While you are engaged in this week’s materials, draw on experiences you have had at presentations, classroom lectures, online lectures, etc., and think about what worked well and what didn’t. Visual lectures, chunked lectures, and authentic activities take more time upfront, but the reward for successful students is well worth it in the long run.