Get Your Geek On!

Keeping a PowerPoint presentation interesting can seem like a challenging task. The typical audience has more than likely sat through hundreds of presentations in their career and they simply need something other than slides full of text to grab and keep their attention. There is hope. If one can consider incorporating the few tips below into their presentations, they may be amazed at the rejuvenated sense of interest received by the audience. 

 Avoid Too Much Text

When drafting a presentation, it is easy to get carried away with writing a novel on each slide. One is excited to convey their ideas and it’s almost an instinct to want to provide the audience with as much information as possible. However, slides that are abundantly wordy can have he opposite affect on an audience. They can simply lose focus and avoid reading the slide altogether. To avoid that, simply include key points that should be discussed. One can make personal notes on each bulleted point and elaborate about each item verbally, but keep the text on the slide brief.

Add Pictures

Everyone has their preferred format for learning, but visual stimulation always adds that extra excitement to presentations that may otherwise be perceived as generic or standard. By incorporating pictures, graphs, tables and other graphic designs into a presentation, one may actually reach out to those audience members that are visual learners and can comprehend materials better when they are presented in a graphic setup.

 Utilize Audience Response Technology

More companies are utilizing audience response systems today. Audience response systems are incorporated into presentations and they function by allowing audience members to provide input through personal handheld devices that are made specifically for the system. For example, the presenter may ask the audience to answer a question based on materials that he or she has just discussed. The question slide would typically offer the audience a few multiple choice answers and the audience simply enters the letter that corresponds to the correct answer.

These three tips can greatly impact how an audience accepts and retains the information provided in a presentation. Audience members are likely to be enthusiastic about learning when they actually have the ability to provide their own input through audience response technology. Visual learners may experience increased retention by seeing more pictures and graphs embedded within the presentation. By minimizing the amount of text that must be read, the audience may be more inclined to stay focused throughout the entire presentation.

 Author bio:

Karlee Wiggins blogs about technology and education techniques.  She enjoys learning and taking university classes in her spare time.