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Experiment! Get input from your students. AA

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Experiment! Get input from your students. AA

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Ask yourself, what you hope to accomplish and plan accordingly.

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Ask yourself, what you hope to accomplish and plan accordingly.

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Add storytelling to help the kids connect to lesson--

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Use presentations as a tool - not the sole form of communication.  Get to the point with your thoughts!

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Use presentations as a tool - not the sole form of communication.  Get to the point with your thoughts!

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MS

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Don't be afraid to try something new...what can it hurt. KB

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Don't be afraid to try something new...what can it hurt. KB

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Utilize storytelling...less is more...different forms of media within a presentation captures attention!
JS

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Utilize storytelling...less is more...different forms of media within a presentation captures attention!
JS

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Be Passionate, To the point, exciting = learning

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You don't know unless you try. Find your creativity.

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Reduce text, add awesome visuals, engage the audience with an effective story!

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Construct to deconstruct. Develop visuals to promote connections with audience.

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Construct to deconstruct. Develop visuals to promote connections with audience.

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Deliver Data Effectively

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Presentations Matter: Why A 2 Way Discussion Is So Powerful

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Presentations are incredibly effective when they use storytelling and visuals to deliver important facts. Create a presentation that sparks change.

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Presentations are one of the most powerful tools for persuasive communication, but they’re not always the right vehicle to deliver information. Sometimes, people need to digest ideas at their own pace, or they need more in-depth information than you want to put on a slide.

Enter slidedocs. Slidedocs are visual documents developed in presentation software that are intended to be read and referenced instead of projected.

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Ecourse
Presentations are one of the most powerful tools for persuasive communication, but they're not always the right vehicle to deliver information. Sometimes, people need to digest ideas at their own pace, or they need more in-depth information than you want to put on a slide.

Enter slidedocs. Slidedocs are visual documents developed in presentation software that are intended to be read and referenced instead of projected.

You'll learn:
* How to chunk up complex ideas and pair them with visuals
* How to make consumable pre-read documents
* How data and diagrams clarify content
* How to use a visual system to create unity
* How to use slidedocs to spread your ideas

Meet the Author

Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte is a communication expert who has been featured in Fortune, Time Magazine, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, and on CNN. Her firm, Duarte, Inc., is the global leader behind some of the most influential visual messages in business and culture. As a persuasion expert, she cracked the code for effectively incorporating story patterns into business communications. She's written five best-selling books and four have won awards.

Read Profile

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Slidedocs®: Spread Ideas With Visual Documents

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Ecourse Presentations are one of the most powerful tools for persuasive communication, but they're not always the right vehicle to deliver information. Sometimes, people need to digest ideas at their own pace, or they need more in-depth information than you want to put on a slide. Enter slidedocs.

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Duarte Design's Five Rules for Presentations by Nancy Duarte

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How to Create a Persuasive Presentation with Nancy Duarte

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Presentations have quite literally changed Nancy Duarte's life. Her passion for creating compelling, persuasive communication has inspired her mission to help others tell stories that spark action. Her journey from failing a college course in public speaking to leading an agency that is re-imagining the medium of presentations has taught her many lessons on the power of communication to change the world.

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Portions of the Book - Free

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@nancyduarte

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Tweets by nancyduarte

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How To Create Better Visual Presenations

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How To Create Better Visual Presenations

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Nancy Duarte: How to Create Better Visual Presentations

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Five Rules For Creating Great Presentations

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Five Rules For Creating Great Presentations

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With over a quarter million presentations under her belt, including notable ones like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth , Nancy Duarte reigns supreme as the world's most sought-after presentation expert. Recently, Nancy paid a visit to HubSpot in preparation for her appearance as keynote speaker at 2011 HUGS , and shared a bit of her wisdom on what sets apart great presentations from average ones.

Nancy Duarte's Five Rules for Creating Great Presentations

Face it. Most presentations are not great. Many of us have come to rely on tools like Powerpoint to facilitate meetings and convey ideas-yet more often than not, we fall short.

How in the world is a slide like this going to inspire action?

Great presentations can and do inspire change. They make meaning. They move people.

Use these five simple but powerful rules to elevate your next presentation from mundane to magnificent.

RULE #1: Treat your audience as king.

Like any good content, great presentations focus less on the author and more on the audience. Don't just throw together slides that force your point of view on the audience; design slides that meet THEIR needs. What does your audience want? What unites them? What incites them? What can you do for them? Why should they adopt your view? And finally, what steps do they need to take? Don't forget that the last slide is the one they'll most remember, so take extra care to be very clear on that final page.

RULE #2: Spread ideas & move people.

Don't just share your ideas or your data; make meaning. Don't focus solely on changing minds; put some effort into changing hearts. Powerful imagery and though-provoking video are excellent tools for connecting your audience to your message emotionally-which after all is how humans ultimately make decisions, and what separates man from machine.

RULE #3: Help them see what you're saying.

On average, half your audience will be verbal thinkers, and half will be visual. Cater to both by brainstorming graphics that will effectively communicate your words. Then apply a consistent look that helps attract, not distract your audience from your message.

RULE #4. Practice design, not decoration.

Nancy rightly points out that 90% of the creative process is actually de structive. You create a slide-and then slowly but surely see what you can peel away.

Do you have one main point? Consider using just a single word on a slide to convey your core message. Want your audience to remember several ideas? Don't plop them all bullet-style on a single slide; reveal them one at a time, creating story, and share an example or anecdote to illustrate each one. Have an image or quote that accurately expresses your idea? Let it! Don't be afraid to remove everything else from the slide, and let that one powerful image say it all.

RULE #5. Cultivate healthy relationships with your slides-and your audience.

Too many of us "hide" behind our slides. We overload them with text and complicated diagrams, hoping they'll reduce the communication burden-when actually they increase it. Reduce the amount of text on your slides as much as possible. Put all of the details in your notes, and practice like crazy! Get in the habit of using slides only as 'digital scenery' and connecting eye to eye with your audience. Remember: the Audience is King.

You can hear Nancy share more wisdom in person at the 2011 HubSpot User Group Summit next month where she'll be the lunchtime keynote speaker. Better yet, consider attending BOTH the Inbound Marketing Summit -where you'll hear from folks like Guy Kawasaki, Dan Heath and Chris Brogan-and HubSpot User Group Summit, so you can meet Nancy in person AND up your overall inbound marketing game. The two events are back to back in Boston this fall.

In the meantime, take a moment to ponder Nancy's Golden Rule: Never deliver a presentation you wouldn't want to sit through yourself.

Amen!

image credit: from Nancy Duarte's best-selling book, Slide:ology The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations

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5 Rules for Creating Great Presentations from @NancyDuarte

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With over a quarter million presentations under her belt, including notable ones like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth , Nancy Duarte reigns supreme as the world's most sought-after presentation expert. Recently, Nancy paid a visit to HubSpot in preparation for her appearance as keynote speaker at 2011 HUGS , and shared a bit of her wisdom on what sets apart great presentations from average ones.

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"Words that are carefully framed and spoken are the most powerful means of communication there is." - Nancy Duarte

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Not Luke Skywalker

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No matter how frustrated you are with your presentation--no matter how bad your slides currently seem--chances are that Duarte Design has seen worse. The 90-person company has worked on hundreds of thousands of presentations, for clients including Twitter, ESPN, and the Food Network.

Duarte is probably best-known for its work with Al Gore and the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth, transforming Gore's passion and mounds of research into Oscar-winning storytelling. Inc. editor-at-large Kimberly Weisul spoke with author and Duarte Design CEO Nancy Duarte about presentation mistakes, investor pitches, and why speakers should think of themselves as Yoda.
Your company, Duarte Design, has worked on literally hundreds of thousands of presentations. What mistakes do you see over and over?
The biggest thing is that people don't have enough empathy.

When you have an opportunity to present, you tend to start to processing information from your own perspective. Usually, it's all about the information you want to give, instead of being about the information the audience wants to receive. You need to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what the audience wants to receive. You need to really think through who you're talking to, and how to make a deep connection with them. Then you need to create content that supports that.

Think: How do I want the audience to change? If they spend an hour with me, how do I want them transformed? Then everything you create needs to support that transformation in them.
How does a great presenter use slides? Most people know they shouldn't read the slides, but what should you do with them instead?
There are two ways to use slides.

You can use slides as cinematic visual aids. The slides should be breathtaking and easy to process. They should pass what I call the glance test. It should take no more than three seconds to process a slide.

Or you can use slides to create your documents. I call these slide docs. That's when you have your whole presentation--almost like a script--in your slides.

If your PowerPoint makes sense on its own, without anyone presenting the slides, you've created a slide doc.

Sometimes sending a slide doc ahead as a pre-read and then doing a glorious presentation is the way to go.
How do you handle a pitch to an investor? Is that a "real" presentation, or are you writing a slide doc?
If an investor is interested, he's going to ask you to send five slides. In that case, you're asking your slides to be your emissary--the emissary that opens the door. Pack as much information as you can on those slides.

Then when you get in the door and get asked in for a meeting, instead of preparing 30 minutes of content, you need to do 10 minutes or 15 minutes, tops. Then let the investor take over. To do a 10 or 15 minute talk well takes an enormous amount of time.

You can put your entire script in the "notes" view in PowerPoint. You can do a nice big layout and make it almost like a brochure. Then it can travel without you. That goes along with the slides you'll show the VCs, but it's not projected. Print it out. When you present to the VC, hand out the "notes" section right away. Say "Here's a handout where we can dig into the numbers." Then do your presentation, and use the handout for the question and answer part.
Are there times when you should just ditch the slides entirely?
Sheryl Sandberg did a great talk at TED Women, but she had no slides.

She didn't need slides. The subject matter was very personal to her. She had plenty of stories. The words that came out of her mouth were visual. She's beautiful, and that helps. She's articulate. She's riveting. It's not like she had to display a piece of data. It made it feel like you were sitting in her living room having a conversation with her.
One of my favorite lines from your TED talk is, "You're not Luke Skywalker, you're Yoda." Could you explain that a bit?
Think about movies and myths. There's often a likeable hero who encounters obstacles and, in overcoming them, is transformed. That's Luke Skywalker. When you're presenting, that's not you.

People go up on stage and set themselves up as if they're the hero. The attitude is, "I'm going to give you this information and it's going to help you." Or, "I'm going to give you this information and you're going to admire me." That's an arrogant stance.

In movies and myths, there's also often the mentor, who comes alongside the hero to help them get unstuck or give them a magical tool. That's Yoda. When you're presenting, that's you. If you look at it that way, suddenly you're more humble.

The presenter's success is completely dependent on the audience adopting the idea. The presenter is not the protagonist. You need to take that and respect that. The audience has the power to take your idea and spread it far and wide. Or it can die.
Do you get nervous when you go on stage?
I do when I'm doing new material that I only feel kind of rehearsed for. And I get nervous if the audience astounds me. I had Deepak Chopra and James Cameron in an audience at the same time. That's kind of intimidating. They were very kind.
How do you handle your nerves?
The best tip I have comes from [speaking coach and author] Nick Morgan. When you're about to go on stage, sometimes your fight or flight reaction kicks in. You think you're being threatened. What you need to do is flip the chemistry back. So when you're backstage, think about someone you love that you haven't seen for a long, long, time, and convince yourself you're going to see that person when you go out onstage.

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Great Speakers Are Like Yoda, Not Luke Skywalker

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No matter how frustrated you are with your presentation--no matter how bad your slides currently seem--chances are that Duarte Design has seen worse. The 90-person company has worked on hundreds of thousands of presentations, for clients including Twitter, ESPN, and the Food Network.

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Duarte Webcast: Create and Declare A Vision Talk that Motivates the Masses

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In this exclusive 45-minute webcast and Q&A, Nancy Duarte teaches leaders how to plan and present vision speeches that inspire people to act. Your presentations have the power to cultivate a feeling of meaning that keeps people motivated and committed to carrying out your vision.

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Grid systems are often used in print and online media to provide a consistent structure to visual communications. Utilizing a grid system in a presentation can allow elements to be displayed in consistent locations, facilitating the absorption of information. In addition, a grid can serve as a guide for employees creating presentations, helping them to know where to place design elements.

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Learn the Secrets Behind Delivering Persuasive Communications. A presentation isn't just a chance to inform, it's a chance to inspire, persuade - and potentially catapult your career. Learn the skills you need to craft compelling communications. Watch this webinar and get a head start toward developing, designing, and delivering a presentation that's made to persuade.

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Using the building blocks you already have in place-your content, presentation system, and visual assets-Duarte can enhance, revise, or redesign your everyday presentations. Watch the video below to see how we transform slides for many of today's top brands.

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Remember that your presentation is a visual!

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Tell Stories, Fewer Words on Slides...bring passion!

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Tell Stories, Fewer Words on Slides...bring passion!

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Keep audience ALWAYS engaged, shorter is better, & have fun!

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If you were in the audience, what would you want to see?

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Keep your audience in mind - what would you like to see

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More Visuals, Interaction, Fewer words on a slide

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Less is more.