The Best Sources Of Advice For Making Good Presentations

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May 25 2009

Posted at 12:37 am under best of the year, talking, teacher resources

Helping our students learn how to deliver good presentations, and helping ourselves practice what we preach, is always a challenging exercise (at least, it is for me). I thought it might be useful to create a “The Best…” list with the resources that I’ve found useful for doing both.

Here are my picks for The Best Sources Of Advice For Making Good Presentations:

10 Powerpoint Tips for Preparing a Professional Presentation

Ten Tips For Students In Making A Good Presentation by Dr. Delaney Kirk (Thanks to Angela Maiers for the tip)

5 Ways to Ruin Your Next Presentation (thanks to Doug Peterson for the tip)

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

The TED Commandments – rules every speaker needs to know

Tom Peters On Presentations

From design to meaning: a whole new way of presenting?

Top Ten Delivery Tips from Garr Reynolds

Make Better Presentations – The Anatomy of a Good Speech

Really Bad PowerPoint by Seth Godin

Brain Rules For Presenters (thanks to EdTech Update for the tip)

The 10 Worst Presentation Habits

This is a very interesting post about the Glance Test:

“…slides should be processed in 3 seconds or less. It’s impossible for people to process your slides and your words simultaneously. The test gives you a quantifiable way to test a slide’s viability as a glance medium by calculating a signal-to-noise ratio for individual slides.”

This can be a very useful tool for both teachers and students to keep in mind when developing any kind of presentation slides.

How To Give A Lousy Presentation is the title of a short and simple Business Week article.

The Problem With PowerPoint is an excellent article from the BBC.

Suggestions and feedback, as always, are welcome.

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8 responses so far

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8 Responses to “The Best Sources Of Advice For Making Good Presentations”

Smart Lemingon 02 Jun 2009 at 9:13 am 1

Hi Larry, here’s a SmartLemming.com new post on presentation skills:

Smart Lemming Rundown: 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators

Link: http://smartlemming.com/2009/06/smart-lemming-rundown-10-simple-secrets-of-the-worlds-greatest-business-communicators/

Lori Grant

[Reply]
Karaon 03 Jun 2009 at 12:55 pm 2

Thank you for mentioning Garr in your post. I work for Peachpit Press and thought you and your readers might be interested in knowing that he just released his first online streaming video, Presentation Zen: The Video, where he expands on the ideas presented in his book and blog. More info can be found here:

http://tr.im/lFvO

[Reply]
Heike Philpon 26 Jul 2009 at 3:58 am 3

Not to be forgotten speedy presentation techniques such as Pecha Kucha20×20 (20slides auto-advancing every 20sec) http://www.pecha-kucha.org or Ignite by O’Reilly20×15 http://ignite.oreilly.org.
Hugely popular because of the snappy presentations and from my own experience, a sobering excercise.
Rgds Heike

[Reply]
Karenne Sylvesteron 23 Aug 2009 at 5:33 am 4

Brilliant post and thanks so much for compiling this list. Methinks a very important and oft shared bookmark!

Karenne

[Reply]
Amandaon 15 Nov 2009 at 9:22 am 5

I’ve been looking for resources on giving PowerPoint presentations so that I can help my students learn this skill. What I’m really looking for is an example of someone giving a GOOD PowerPoint presentation. If anyone knows of one on youtube, I would love to see a link. I can do one myself for them, but I’ve actually been to some conferences where the speakers did awesome presentations using PowerPoint the way it is meant to be used, and I’d love to show something like this to my students, regardless of the topic. Thanks!

[Reply]
Simon Morton Reply:
November 16th, 2009 at 1:44 am
Hi Amanda,

Nice to hear of someone searching for an example of PowerPoint being used effectively! It so often is the other way (and yes, there are lots of examples of bad PowerPoint presentations!).

Whilst the videos we recently posted onto our YouTube channel may not be EXACTLY what you’re after, I hope they’ll give you some food for thought:

http://www.youtube.com/user/eyefulpresentations

In the meantime, I’d recommend viewing Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”, a presentation designed by Duarte Design (http://www.duarte.com)

Hope this helps!

Simon

[Reply]
Heike Philpon 15 Nov 2009 at 9:46 am 6

Hi Amanda,

Earlier I mentioned to Larry a Pecha Kucha, speedy presentation technique.

If you would like to learn what Pecha Kucha is all about, please watch this recorded presentation of mine, which is a Pecha Kucha about Pecha Kucha.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ4supn_I3g

Incidentally we had a Pecha Kucha night at the Virtual Round Table conference on Fri, Nov 13 and were able to watch 7 Pecha Kuchas at that time. One was better than the other. It was amazingly brilliant. These were recorded and I am in the middle of processing the recordings. Once they are done, I will send you the links.

I am sure you will very much enjoy sharing them with your learners.

Rgds Heike

[Reply]
aladinon 16 Nov 2009 at 4:40 pm 7

i found this site very useful.
this would totally be in good use
why didn’t i think of this?

[Reply]