1. Active Learning

Don't talk for long periods. Break up your speaking with activities for your audience to do. You could:

Before you start giving activities, explain to your audience what they will be doing and why. If you will have them form smaller groups, you may need to help them form those groups the first few times. The activities should take only a few minutes, and make those activities relevant and meaningful to what they are learning. Make sure you review what the audience did, so they don't think you are just wasting their time.

Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, Chapter 6 . Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent. Published by Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594 www.josseybass.com

Using Active Learning Instructional Strategies to Create Excitement and Enhance Learning . Jim Eison, Ph.D.  

2. Do NOT Read Your Slides

Present only a few summary phrases on your slide, then talk about each one. DO NOT put all the words you are going to say on the slide. This will make you read the slide to the audience, and NOBODY want to listen to you read the slide. They can read it faster to themselves than you can read it aloud. The only time this might be useful is when the audience cannot understand you, whether it is because of an accent, or you speak too quickly or too softly.

 

Generally, you should put just a few lines of text on a screen. If you have a good graphic or image that adds information to the text and what you are saying, put that on the screen and talk about it. Do not subject your audience to "Death by PowerPoint."

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2014/11/14/six-ways-to-avoid-death-by-powerpoint/#320a0ad434cb

3. Slide Animation

When you hear someone talk about slide animation, you may be thinking of twirling newspapers to indicate time passing, but animation simply means changing the content of a slide while still showing that slide. It can be a way of drawing on a slide, like we used to do with overheads, to emphasize something, or point to something to direct the audience's attention to it. OMERAD has created a free online tutorial on how to design slides according to principles of learning, and one of the tools we use is animation. We do this within PowerPoint, and this tutorial will demonstrate how to do it.

http://omerad.msu.edu/meded/effectiveppt_intro.html

4. Practice, Practice, Practice

You may not think you need to practice your presentation. After all, you have your notes, and you know the topic. But you will be surprised how choppy your presentation is initially. You may be searching for words, especially now that you are not reading your slides. (Don't read your notes word for word either!) Practice helps you know your slides so well that you do not need to rely on notes or words on the slides. Practice makes your delivery smooth, and you can build in any pauses, questions, and slide changes or animations you will be using. Practice in front of a mirror, and in front of others, and in front of a video camera. You might think that over practice makes your presentation robotic, but if you practice building in timing and voice modulation, you will not sound robotic. You will sound enthusiastic, and your audience will respond to that.