"I know you probably can't see this at the back" - why most presentations you see in school are terrible...

...and 5 things you can do about it - if it's you delivering the next one!

I would be willing to bet you have been to a staff meeting, INSET or some other form of training where the hapless presenter has uttered the immortal words 'I know you probably can't see this at the back', or similar. Indeed I have more than likely been that hapless presenter myself, in the past. But it doesn't have to be that way.  Because remember if you're using PowerPoint or Slides, you're giving a presentation, you're not giving a document.  We can also teach our children this as well - then maybe that phrase "sorry you won't be able to see this, but..." will die out...?!

Here are my 5 tips to follow, whatever presentation method you're using:

Aim for say, 15 words on a slide. This will be one point you are making.  Providing 6 or 7 bullet points means the audience is just going to read the entire slide ahead of you, as you're still talking about your first point.  This way you can also avoid those transitions, which often only serve to distract from what you're saying anyway.

This goes hand-in-hand with the previous tip.  Be brave and make those (up to) fifteen words fill the slide.  Are people going to complain that the text is too big? Probably - you're in a school(!) - but that's better than not seeing it at the back, surely?  Also remember they called it PowerPOINT  for a reason - not Powerparagraph! 

Rather than another sentence or bullet point, put up an image that relates to your point. As mentioned, you're giving a presentation, not a document, so your audience is more likely to listen to you as the image will be there to just support what you're saying. 

Instead of just putting up a graph from Excel/Sheets etc and muttering the immortal phrase from this blog post's title, do some number crunching and pick out the headlines - why are you showing the graph? A few slides of the important key facts will keep your audience interested and alert.  Have the graph up there initially if you must, but move on to your next slides with your main points as soon as you can. 

As well as being a useful aide-memoire for yourself (what do I say when the picture of the panda comes up...?!) having speaker notes will be useful for anyone who needs to access your presentation who couldn't make your meeting or training.  A presentation, unlike a document, is exactly that, a tool to augment what you're saying, so it's going to stand to sense it might not make the most sense than if you gave them the old-fashioned document-style presentation.

If you're interested in the finer points of PowerPoint/Slides design, check out 'You Suck at PowerPoint' - an irreverent guide to this subject. It's pretty old now (2010) but the points are still relevant today.