Some Tips and Tricks

Dear World,

Over the years I've used many LEGO kits in my classroom. Some of my favourites have been the Mindstorms Robotics, the motorised LEGO Technic Kits and even the Duplo when I taught the younger children.

Here's a little model I knocked together in about 15 minutes

In this program you can drag and drop a huge variety of parts onto the workspace, manipulate them and create your own LEGO models on screen.

What kinds of resources are available for school leaders when it comes to improving their presentations?

First, if the current presentation mode is a PowerPoint with screen after screen of bulleted text, there are two categories of resources:

1)     Those that suggest throwing those presentations out and starting over again, and

2)     Those that help make a bad thing better until there's time to do a good thing well.

Actually, in the book I just wrote, They Snooze, You Lose: the educator's guide to successful presentations, I offer both types of resources. For the purposes of this article, I'd suggest we focus on the second, "quick tweak" approach. You can get a great start on improving your presentations by referring to the free copy of Chapter 1 of the book ("Tweaking presentations: templates, color, and type"), which you can download athttp:lynellburmark.schoolvideos.com/snooze. In that chapter, I explain why typefaces like Georgia and Verdana work on the screen (and Times and Arial do not), why blue is the best color for backgrounds, and how yellow "pops" for text. All the suggestions are absolutely free and easy to implement.

You can also visit my website - www.educatebetter.org - and click on Free Resources to get links to images to incorporate in your presentations.

I would also recommend anything written by Nancy Duarte (who did Al Gore's slides for the movie An Inconvenient Truth) and Garr Reynolds. Although their books are not written specifically for educators, we can definitely appropriate their ideas and suggestions. I quote them both extensively in the Snooze book.

How can you capture the audience in the first 5 minutes of the presentation?

As my colleague David Thornburg suggests, you turn on radio station WIFM (What's in It For Me). Let the attendees know that you value their time, understand their needs, and that you plan to deliver practical, research-backed information, strategies and/or activities they can replicate and implement tomorrow, and - it never hurts - some kind of prize drawing that makes it worthwhile staying until the end of the presentation session. (I try to give away an LCD projector, but food would usually suffice as an economical alternative.)

How can you set the tone of the presentation?

Of course, the fastest way to create ambiance is with music. In just seconds, the audience members' heartbeats will synch up to the music you are playing. Relaxed? Energized? You pick the track.

A smile on your face also speaks volumes, as does the image on the startup slide that should be displayed as people are coming into the room.

What about interspersing video clips amongst your slides?

This is a presentation imperative! It is well documented (see research by cognitive psychologist John Medina) that humans can't focus on a talking head for more than 10 minutes. You have to change it up. I talk about the 10:2 rule. 10 minutes (maximum) of lecture followed by 2 minutes (minimum) of some other kind of activity. A 2-minute video clip is ideal, either to complement a point you've just made or to introduce the next one. Relevant drop-dead gorgeous and fall-over funny videos are particularly desirable.

Once you download a video clip (from the Internet or from a subscription service like Discovery Education) you simply Insert...Movie onto a slide in your presentation. You can choose to have it play automatically when you advance to that slide, or you can manually click to start the video.

How can you solicit feedback from the audience on the effectiveness of the presentation?

Laughter and applause are great ongoing feedback during the presentation. Colleague Hall Davidson invites audience members to set their cell phones to the "applause ringtone" rather than turning them off. After each presentation, I have audience members fill out a half-page form where they indicate one thing they will use from the presentation. That helps them focus on taking away something valuable; it also tallies for me what were the most powerful ideas or activities during in session in case I have the opportunity to do the session (or something similar) in the future. I collect those half-sheets and use them to conduct a drawing for valuable prizes.