8 Simple Tips for Improving Student Presentations

By Neil Stephenson

My students recently delivered presentations on Canadian Immigration where they were asked to first create a family tree, and then choose one of the cultures from their own ancestry to dig into. Students were then given the choice of how they would present their finding back to our class. Since most students chose to deliver a PPT/Keynote, I thought I’d give them some tips/guidelines on effective presentations.

Here’s the simple one page handout I made for them:

Student Should Present, not PowerPoint

The most important element for me (the first) is that the student needs to be the presentation, not the deck of slides. I’ve seen so many presentations (both my students and others) where the presenters hid behind the slide deck, or the presenter merely becomes another audience member facing the screen and reading along. I wanted to get my students past that – and push them toward being the presentation. We talked about how this approach to presenting is far more scary, but a requirement for an effective presentation.

As you can see from the list, I also put some fairly strict boundaries around the number of slides and the number of words per slide. While I realize these are somewhat artificial, the students really worked their slide decks through to get down to the essence of the subject matter. I will definitely use similar limits/boundaries on PPT slide decks for now on.

Overall, I was really pleased with the quality of the presentations – the students really stepped and included the elements we discussed. It was great to see the students themselves become the presentation. Well done guys!!

No related posts.

2 Responses to 8 Simple Tips for Improving Student Presentations

  1. robertogreco on April 13, 2010 at 4:09 am

    Great advice. I've shared some Pecha Kucha and Ignite presentations to get these points across, adding brevity as an additional goal. Last year my sixth graders ended up holding a Pecha Kucha Night that wowed all attendees. Students formed groups of three and presented only three or four slides each.

    Now if we could just get them to avoid embedding their text in their blog posts, so it's easy for others to cite. ;)

    Reply
  2. robertogreco on April 13, 2010 at 4:11 am

    Whoah, I didn't realize this was almost a year old – popped up on Twitter somewhere today.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*