I too faced the same problems with students both grad, under grad and high
school. In addition to to everybody's most excellent advice, I might
suggest the following web site
http://www.vivid.com/form/unified/unified.html This is the VIVID site.
with Nathan Shedroff., He is a master of info design, an advertising
genius. (BofA, TigerWoods, major advertising agencies) A little cross
pollination is useful.
Most people fail in the information design area. The written/described
conventions are deadly dull--a sure fire prescription for 1)going to sleep
and 2) snoring (very embarrassing)
If conventions MUST be followed, so be it They can always be changed in
later presentations. Try out slides with serif and san serif type fonts
in different sizes. and check on the visual readability at various
distances and levels of room illumination, and possibly different sizes of
rooms. The axis of charts MUST be identified. CHECK THE READABILITY
LEVELS OF YOUR PRESENTATION (Microsoft is good because it has different
readability scales) This simple notion will avoid the jargon, the acronyms
et al. I use a speech to text -text to speech piece of software when
writing and practicing my presentations. Cleans up English and exhumes the
unnecessary "um-huh' and the functor words such as "and" which may be
critical to your presentation. A really, good, inexpensive piece of
software is "Intellitalk" ( $40.00 )which has text to speech capacity but
not speech to text capacity. Dragon software is the leading producer of
the latter.
In addition to what has alreadly been pointed out, there must be
significant level of interaction between the poster, slide, the presentor
and the presentees. If the interaction does not occur the
talk,poster,slides are really a waste of time. The best of all information
is lost through lack of interaction. Every high school teacher knows this.
The best story possible must be told, (all grant writers know this) and we
are faced with a problem that Hemingway addressed--he went through his
manuscripts and cut out almost every other word and then ended up with the
clean style. Boredom in a presentation sets in almost immediately and
high school students are no different than post doc , doc scientists,
high school principals and teachers.
Mary Ann Sesma
Mary Ann Sesma e mail
1621 Sunnyhill Drive msesma at bell.k12.ca.us (preferred)
Monterey Park, CA 91754 sesma at aol.com
phone; (213)261-5860
fax:(213)261-8692
