The key to any good presentation is engaging your audience. This can be done through having a good speaker, excellent slides, and making sure your audience is able to follow your discussion and thought process through to its conclusion. Too much information crammed onto a slide or too much technical jargon can lose an audience quickly, but never fear. Thing 12 will look at some great ways to deliver a successful presentation.

(Note: The sourcing good images and Creative Commons videos mentioned will be covered in Thing 13 and Thing 14 so you can jump ahead if you want or just stick with Thing 12 for now.)

Video transcript

Of course, not everyone can get to your fantastic talk or those that did might want to have a copy of your slides so they can follow up on some of your points later. If you’re lucky you might be at an event that will disseminate your slides for you to attendees but there are better ways to share your work, and sharing it on your terms.

SlideShare, as the name suggests, is a social website that allows you to share your slides, receive feedback and questions, as well as finding other people’s slides for inspiration and information. You can upload any set of slides, add a description of your choice, add tags for discoverability and then share the resulting link with your social networks. Plus, you can always inform an audience that you will be making your slides available after the talk for them so they can relax and enjoy what you have to say as opposed to making panicked notes. Always a plus.

Because anyone can find your content on SlideShare, you can allocate various intellectual rights to them, so you can keep your slides as All Rights Reserved or open them up more using Creative Commons licencing (which we will cover in Thing 13) so people can reuse your slides and build on them. More importantly, by making your slides publicly available you are extending the reach and impact of your research while also adding to the existing narrative around your subject area.

Thing 12 activities

Make a quick 5 slide PowerPoint presentation on any topic (even kittens!)

Upload your presentation to SlideShare

Share a link to your uploaded SlideShare presentation on Twitter using the #23researchcam hashtag

Write a blog post about your experience of SlideShare and your thoughts on a good presentation. What was the last really good presentation you went to and what made it work so well?

Also link to your presentation in your post. You can even try embedding it!

Thing 12 learning outcomes

You should be able to understand the key components of a good presentation

You should be able to understand the importance of adjusting presentations for different audiences

You should have experience of using SlideShare

You should be able to understand the benefits of sharing resources in an accessible/public way

You should have reflected on Thing 12 through blogging

Image: Mister G.C.