Giving Presentations - How hard can it be?
Introduction
Just over two years ago I attended my first 1k Club event. I enjoyed the talks by all various speakers but the one that really affected me was Kate Bellinghams talk. She talked about recruiting education ambassadors in order to get the message through to schools. After the talk I approached her and gave my details as a willing volunteer. Now at that point I did not really know what I was letting myself in for as I had no experience of standing up in front of people and giving talks. A little later that year I received a memory stick with a sample presentation on it and I was beginning to get the idea. At the Manchester Science Fair later that year Kate had a talk with me about giving talks in schools, but at that time I was asking for training or some help and Kate did suggest that she may have been able to do a joint one with me. However, Kate had to leave the project and that never happened.
Southgate School Science Club
I kept thinking about how to start the ball rolling and what sort of strategy to use to ease myself into it.
At the time my daughter was in year 8 and I got to know her form tutor who just happened to run the after school science club on Monday afternoons. This seemed an ideal opportunity to ease myself into the business of giving presentations.
Eventually this happened in April 2010 and I gave an updated version of the original PowerPoint that Kate had given me to around 15 year 7 and 8 students. They were a very forgiving audience and I had the advantage of knowing the person running the science club and one other teacher which helped me relax a bit.
In the end it went very well and I ended the talk by getting them to make balloon cars which was very well received.
Barnet Air Cadets
My eldest son had been in the Air Cadets and having grown out of that became a civilian instructor. I kept suggesting to him about giving a talk to the cadets and this eventually happened in September 2010. This was a good next step as although the audience was considerably bigger at around 30, once again they were very forgiving due to the nature of the material and the involvement of the RAF. I changed the PowerPoint file and updated it with newer information from the website and videos from You Tube As it happens this went horribly wrong. I had computer problems and ended up using bits of the earlier presentation and prints of the newer version all mixed up.
However, this did not seem to matter. The Cadets sat there patiently and took it all in. At the end I had around 20mins of questions and one of them asked me for a copy of the slide with the Navier Stokes equations on it!
Grundy Park Scuba Club
The last presentation I gave was quite recent to a group of adults in a scuba club.
This was a completely different proposition and I was very nervous. Once again I revised the powerpoint file to include newer information and to suit the age of the audience. It was hard work for a while but they eventually warmed up and asked lots of awkward questions and the talk was very well received.
Conclusions
I ended up accidentally developing a strategy to giving presentations and learning “on the hoof” ...
- Start small ideally with some people you know.
- Work up to larger audiences steadily.
- Use a presentation to suit the age and knowledge of the audience. For instance, with the Air Cadets I showed a picture of the EJ200 with no caption. One of them identified it immediately!
David Barker
March 2011
