16 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 journies. 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 your learning of 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 in designing your presentations and assessments (next section). When presenting in a classroom, this is easier because you can add authentic active learning into the class time. In a traditional classroom, you almost have a captive audience; it is easy to see what is working and what is not and change your teaching style on the fly. In an online classroom, you need to captivate your audience during the presentation stage. In the classroom, 7 minutes is the average time it takes for the audience to lose interest in a good presentation. So it is important to remember to think about ways to bring their attention back to you. This isn’t as easy when creating online lectures, and you will need to take some 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 text on the slide before you are done with 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 of successful students is well worth it in the long run.

When presenting materials in class and online, pay attention to your lecturing technique. The following video was created by me for my adult education course and included best practices when lecturing your students.  While the video is a “few” years old, and I look older now, it still contains best practices that are relevant today.

The following PDF shares tips on presenting content via in-person and online lectures Presentation tips outline AMcMillan

The next video is a 2-minute teacher video I completed for UNMC Faculty development on video lectures ( the wrong way and a better way) a few years ago.