W11 Public Speaking

 Most of us have seen the image in which, depending on your perception, you see either the outline of a vase or the facial profiles of two people facing each other. Or perhaps you have seen the image of the woman who may or may not be young, depending on your frame of reference at the time. Those that only see the young woman are right and those that only see the old woman are also right!

Just in case: Carry a roll of masking tape or some pushpins so you can display your poster even if the easel is gone. Test the computer setup. Have your slides on a flash drive AND send it to yourself as an attachment or upload to a Cloud service.

REMEMBER: you need to tell your audience what to listen for (and look for) do this before the video, etc.

Decision trees are good at showing the relationships between ideas.

Pictograph: a graph that uses iconic symbols to dramatize differences in amounts

Maps are useful if the information is clear and limited.

High quality photographs are now expected. Visual aids should enhance the speech and not just "be there"

Videos should not repeat what you have already said but add to it.

>Text should not be smaller than 22 point font for best visibility.

>7x7 rule

>in terms of visibility, most experts say that sans serif fonts such as Arial, Tahoma, and Verdana are better for reading from screens than serif fonts such as Times New Roman, Bookface, Georgia, or Garamond.

> look at the audience, not the slides

>It is easier to click on a hyperlink rather than embed a video into the slide because it makes the file too large.

>You can give a power point presentation and use a dry-erase board to write down audience responses

Prezi, available at www.prezi.com

 • Slide Rocket, available at www.sliderocket.com 

• Google Slides, available in Google Drive and useful for collaborative assignments 

• Keynote, the Apple presentation slide software on MACs 

• Impress, an Open Office product (http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html) 

• Prezent-It 

• AdobeAcrobat Presenter 

• Hancom Office 2020

some presenters put a black slide between slides in the presentation so that hitting the forward key gives the same effect, but hitting it again takes them to a new screen. (Other programs have similar functions; for example, if using Prezi, the “B” key also shows a black screen.

Franck Frommer, a French journalist and communication expert, published the book How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid (2012), whose title says it all. He criticizes the “linearity” of PowerPoint and similar presentation software, meaning that audiences are not encouraged to see the relationship of ideas and that PowerPoint hurts critical thinking in the audience.

It should be mentioned here that Prezi helps address one of the major criticisms of PowerPoint. Because Prezi, in its design stage, looks something like a mind map on a very large canvas with grid lines, it allows you to show the relationship and hierarchy of ideas better. For example, you can see and design the slides so that the “Big Ideas” are in big circles and the subordinate ideas are in smaller ones

• Why are supporting materials necessary?
• Is supporting material always a visual aid?  
  • Can you identify at least three ways to verbally support your speech with supporting material?
• How does one ethically use supporting material?
• What is the function of presentation aids?
• What are some best practices for using Presentation Slides?
• What makes a presentation aid effective? What visual aid might be ineffective and why?
• How does supporting material that engages the senses positively impact attention and memory?