Presentation Skills You can make it better with Prezi

For many people the mere thought of giving a presentation fills them with fear.  This article sets out some hints and tips to make it a success.

Planning

It seems really obvious when someone says you need to plan your presentation.  Often however this is an area that is skimmed over.
How long?
As a general rule, I suggest that you take the time allocated for the presentation time and multiply it by 3 to give you an indicative time for your planning.

Structure

If you are going to get your message across you need structure.  One of the best tips I ever received was to think of the presentation like a newspaper article.  You have:

o    A headline

o    Two or three messages

Slides

Many of us will have heard the term death by power point.  Presenters can often:

o        Have too many slides

o        Have too much content on the slides

o        Use too many graphics

Again, as rule of thumb, if you are doing a presentation lasting 10-15 minutes you are unlikely to need more than 6 slides.

Practice

No matter how many times you have delivered a presentation you need to practice you presentation in advance.  Start with standing in front of a mirror.  Then move on to practising in front of your family or partner.  Then colleagues and friends.  Try to do at least 3 practice runs.

Feedback

Ask and listen carefully to the feedback you are receiving about the structure, slides and delivery.  See this as an opportunity to turn a good presentation into a great presentation.

Delivering Presentation

For many, this is the part they dread.  Here are a few tips to ensure things go smoothly.

o    Check the equipment in advance

o    Make sure you know how to load the presentation

o    Take a few minutes to relax yourself before you start

o    Don't worry about memorising the words, just remember your headline and key messages

o    Pace yourself

o    Try not to be  too serious

o    Have fun

Duncan Brodie is a Leadership Development Coach and Management Trainer at Goals and Achievements http://www.goalsandachievements.co.uk
He specialises in helping and accountants and professionals to make the transition from technical expert to manager and leader.

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Presentation-Skills&id=507871] Presentation Skills

Several Died in the Delivery of This PPT

Death by Powerpoint has become commonplace. Initially thought to be the be-all-and-end-all for drop dead presentations, now the audience is dying of boredom. The visual spectacle of the different templates and colour schemes is now commonplace. The repetitive and consistent use of bulleted points diminishes the message to the simplistic overview of the subject. The animations no longer dazzle the audience with "Oh. The claw!" like reactions similar to those three little Pizza Planet squeaker aliens in the Toy Story films.

When you go to a formal meeting, don't you expect there will be a Powerpoint and that there will be a handout containing the printed slides and space for you to write notes in the margins? It doesn't make for a dynamic, interesting delivery if your audience knows exactly what to expect.

I'm going to absolutely straight with you-The Powerpoint is no longer the best tool for delivering a message that you want people to remember. It doesn't matter if you are a teacher, an entrepreneur, or a business associate. If you want people to remember YOUR presentation, you need to change YOUR approach.

There are many online tools and applications for presentation delivery that will help you to make your presentation visually dynamic, interesting and memorable. These tools not only create a more interesting presentation but allow you to break free from the linear presentation. It's not necessary to organize your information in a linear format. In fact, it would be better to NOT organize your information in a linear format since your audience will have questions, and in answering their questions, you can easily move in a new direction if you use a different presentation tool.

Prezi and Ahead are two such presentation platforms that I have been exploring for use by my students in classroom presentations. My students are definitely Powerpoint addicts, and I will be requiring them to use one of these two online tools in the future. Prezi allows you to create a presentation in a more visual format with all your presentation elements being placed on what Information Technology Specialist, Michael Zimmer, refers to as "an Infinite Canvas." There is zoom tool for focusing of whatever aspect of the presentation is the current focus when delivering your information. This platform allows you to integrate PDF, JPG and DOC files. You can even incorporate PPT files! Ahead is much like Prezi, but there are more font and colour options. There are also more types of files that can be uploaded. In Ahead, information is organized into Scenes, so you can determine the direction of your planned presentation; however, it's easy to veer off the path if necessary and then return to where you left off. These online software programs are considered three-dimensional presentation tools.

If you are an educator, Prezi offers a free education account! In addition, Prezi offers options ranging from a free public account to paid enjoy/pro accounts with annual subscriptions. Ahead offers two plans: free, for the public; and pro, for the professional which is a monthly subscription.

I plan to start using Prezi with an educator's account next school year. I encourage you to get off the Powerpoint bandwagon to prevent further deaths by PPT! For another entertaining perspective on ineffective Powerpoint uses, watch   rel=nofollow [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpvgfmEU2Ck]Life After Death by Powerpoint 2010 by comedian Don McMillan.

Kimberly Wagner teaches English Literature and Language in Ontario, Canada. She is qualified to teach with an Ontario Bachelor of Education at the Junior, Intermediate and Senior levels; she also has her Specialist in English as well as Intermediate History qualifications. Over the last 14 years, she has taught all high school grades and levels of English in the Ontario public school system. She would like to give her 21st century perspective on the teaching of English/Language Arts! She has a blog about English teaching and resources at http://cheekylit.com

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Several-Died-in-the-Delivery-of-This-PPT&id=4702914] Several Died in the Delivery of This PPT

Benefits to Using Prezi Instead of PowerPoint Slides

In my past life as a graphic designer, I was always looking for an alternative to PowerPoint slide presentations. I knew that people dreaded the typical slide deck that has become so common - word charts with too many words, graphs with too much detail, irrelevant images from stock file houses and bullet point after bullet point.

As a member of the speaker support team, we used to call it "Death by PowerPoint." Slide shows have been around for many decades, of course. The most boring shows are similar to the one-projector "bombs" that filled many boardrooms over the years.

As a multi-media producer in the '80s, I learned to design and show multi-image slide shows, which used multiple projector systems and were able to improvise a rudimentary form of animation. They were costly, but effective. With the introduction of computers and Microsoft's presentation tool PowerPoint, just about anyone could become a graphic designer by simply transferring a Word doc outline into the program and loading a template. As meetings proliferated, so did the slide decks. Now they are found all over the web, in the form of webinars and web conferences, by the thousands. Every day, another online meeting host is launching a PowerPoint slide deck and audiences are becoming less and less interested.

Then, in steps Prezi. I found this tool just a few weeks ago and have really enjoyed working with it. This graphic presentation software called " Prezi " could change the nearly religious use of slides in online meetings, by introducing a new way of visual storytelling that is much less boring.

Prezi's functions and uses are easy to understand, because menus are simple. Within a Prezi presentation, an author can use high-resolution still images, wordcharts and graphics, plus clean text and zooming and panning animations that allow the presenter to show a "big-picture" visual. Videos and PDFs can also be placed in Prezi files.

The software is designed to move the viewer along a path around a big-picture view. It also lets the author hide or show elements by making them too small to be seen until a certain time in the overall presentation. The slide transitions are very different in this Flash-based tool which allows the designer to take the audience on a path from beginning from end, or to stop along the path and interact with the content. And that is what is usually missing from the typical PowerPoint slide deck - surprise.

When a designer has the ability to zoom in to any areas of charts and graphics, without having to redraw or reorganize the data, so that the presenter can speak directly to a specific point that is demonstrated by the data, things get interesting. Presenters can show the zoomed-in portion of a graph and then easily back out to visualize the big picture. After completing a Prezi design and impressing both my clients and my webinar audiences, it's clear that I'll never look at a slide deck in a webinar quite the same way again.

Gary Jesch is the owner and virtual event specialist at [http://consolecall.com]Console Call, helping hosts who conduct online meetings and webinars. He also runs [http://chops.com]CHOPS Live Animation and is a pioneer in the art of performance animation of 3D interactive cartoon characters for business meetings, tradeshow traffic building and special events.

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Benefits-to-Using-Prezi-Instead-of-PowerPoint-Slides&id=5465119] Benefits to Using Prezi Instead of PowerPoint Slides

Prezi simply stunning presentations

Prezi is better presentation tool than Power Point. You will be amazed by the features that it contains. Take a look it's wonderful. You can find it on prezi.com