Digest #178: Boosting Presentation Skills
Cover image by Pavel Danilyuk from Pexels
Delivering engaging and effective presentations is important when it comes to teaching or when presenting work at conferences. As teachers, we may want to help our students to develop their presentation skills and prepare them to become confident speakers. Today’s digest offers resources on boosting presentation skills.
10 Tips for Improving Your Public Speaking Skills by Marjorie North, Harvard Division of Continuing Education
A very quick read that highlights ten concrete tips for effective presentations and public speaking. The concluding remark of this resource points out that it is all about authenticity when it comes to presenting and less about perfection: “Good communication is never perfect, and nobody expects you to be perfect.”
An Educator’s Guide to Improving Student Presentation Skills by James Laing, GoodCourse
This post outlines how teachers can support their students in overcoming anxiety and how to structure teaching in order to encourage students to develop their presentation skills.
Ten Simple Rules for Effective Presentation Slides by Kristen M. Naegle, PLoS Computational Biology
As much as presentation slides can be helpful, they can often be text-heavy and challenging to follow. Disorganised slides can reduce the overall presentation quality. This paper provides ten tips on how to make looking at your slides a joyful experience.
Speech Anxiety by the Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh
While it is normal to feel nervous before a presentation, this feeling should not take over and dominate you as a presenter. There are things you can do to reduce the fear of public speaking. Take a look at the tips in this resource. They may not work immediately, but with time can be helpful to tackle anxiety around presenting in front of an audience.
Understanding PowerPoint Accessibility by the Digital Accessibility Office, University of Colorado Boulder
Last, but not least, it is important to deliver inclusive presentations. Making presentations accessible for people with disabilities will enhance the quality of the presentation as a whole. This resource provides concrete tips on increasing presentation accessibility.
From time to time, we pick a theme and provide a curated list of links. If you have a theme suggestion, please don’t hesitate to contact us! Occasionally we publish a guest digest, and If you'd like to propose a guest digest click here. Our 5 most recent digests can be found here:
Digest #173: Responsible Use of AI in Education
Digest #174: Assessing Learning Strategies
Digest #175: Authentic Assessments
