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Education  |  Sep 21 2019

5 Interactive Presentations Ideas that will Engage Students

Interactive presentations should always be an educator’s goal. Dry, teacher-centered lectures lose students’ interest, while interactive presentations grab and hold attention. Getting students involved improves retention, understanding, and enjoyment. And it’s remarkably easy to involve the audience with just a few easy principles (especially with the right technology at your disposal).

Start creating interactive presentations with the tips and tricks below or get more insights on modern education technology.

Students today expect the classroom to be both educational and enjoyable at the same time. Interactive presentations help engage students by having them participate in the lessons instead of passively listening to lectures. This reduces boredom and gives students a sense of responsibility to be attentive.

A Gallup Poll  of about 3,000 schools shows that around the 5 th  grade 74% of students feel they are engaged in school, but by the 10 th , 11 th , and 12 th grade those numbers fall to the 30% range. It is important for educators from K-12 and on to higher education to recognize that keeping students engaged in the classroom is important and the adoption of interactive learning environments can be a key driver.

Millennials and Generation Y students are especially accustomed to being a part of the lessons and not just a spectator. Students are encouraged to talk and offer their ideas to create a collaborative atmosphere where both teachers and students are sources of knowledge and insight. The teacher plays more of a facilitator role in moving the lesson along and encouraging students to participate in their own learning outcomes. Students offer their own input, additional information, and give examples of how they would apply the key concepts.

The learning task is the central aspect of the interactive presentations (instead of the teacher’s energy level and hold on the students’ attention spans) and the lessons evolve around it. Even though the teacher is normally, the ‘presenter’ in most cases the ‘interaction’ part comes in a variety of ways to get students participating in the lesson. Many activities, games, role-plays, quizzes, and discussions  can be integrated into the presentation flow and the lessons will take different directions from there. We will discuss later many examples of tools and techniques to encourage collaborations.

Technological Aid in Interactive Presentations

Although interactive presentations can be done without technology, it is greatly aided with the adoption of tools designed to facilitate the learning process. For example, a quiz is given in the middle of the presentation. On one side, traditionally a teacher can write the quiz before the lesson starts, print out copies for all students, pass out the quiz, and collect answers. To provide feedback for the exercise the teacher will also need to grade and start a discussion on the results before moving on to the next topic. This process is time-consuming and restrictive.

With technological aid such as an interactive digital whiteboard or a classroom quizzing application on individual devices, the students and teacher can come up with the quiz questions on the spot. This digital quiz can be administrated wirelessly to all students and within seconds, the results can be shared with all participants to discuss. This greatly increases spontaneity, variability, and class involvement.       

5 Interactive Presentations Ideas and Corresponding Technology Aids

1. Storytelling

The teacher does not have to be the only star. The glory of the presentation can go to all participants who have a story to tell. The main concepts can be discussed and students should be given time to come up with a personal example. This exercise helps students relate to the subject matter and getting to listen to other students’ examples will drive home the concepts further. The need for the teacher to plan extensive examples and be the only one talking during the presentation is reduced. Teachers can also judge by the stories shared how much the students are understanding.

Storytelling with technology: Many digital whiteboards have Cast and Throw functions that will allow students to work on their own examples on their devices and send this to the whiteboard when sharing. This allows students to quickly go up and share their stories without sending files by email, wires, or USBs.

2. Non-linear presentation

Presentations that do not follow a strict order but organically flow from topic to topic based on the audience’s feedback are a great way to engage participants. Once prepared, the presenter can flow from one topic to the next by asking questions, polling, or receiving requests at the end of each key point. This allows the audience to ‘build’ their own presentation on what they want to hear not in a rigid manner as with traditional slide-based presentations.

Non-linear presentation with technology : There are non-linear presentation applications like  Prezi which helps presenters build presentations on easy-to-customize templates. They offer a zoomable canvas (not slides) to help people share knowledge, stories and inspire audiences to act. The canvas shows relationships between points and offers a recommended flow but not a set path to follow.

3. Polls, surveys, and quizzes

One of the most recognizable and used tools in the classroom to get a fast reaction from students are polls, surveys & quizzes. For polls, simple questions that have limited answers are used to gather a consensus. This could be in the form of a raise of hands, ballots, or having students form groups. Surveys would require printed paper sheets with multiple choices, scales, or short answers to gather opinions. Quizzes are used to quickly test a student’s knowledge on what was just covered, so the class can identify weak areas and crystalize main concepts.

Polls, surveys, and quizzes can be anonymous or not. Openly requiring students to share their ideas on results such as a debate or open discussion would increase the interactives of the activity. Students can also be tasked to create questions and grade their own surveys and quizzes for an added layer of participation within the presentation.

Polls, surveys, and quizzes with technology : Many classroom management software such as  Google Classroom has built-in tools to create polls, surveys, and quizzes along with assignments, communication, and other educational features. Once submitted, the collection and grading are instantaneous. The results can be shared easily with students both individually or as a group. 

Is there a student – of any age – who does not like a good game, contest, or competition? Adding a small game into a presentation breaks up the normal lecture format and gets the audience to think critically to help their team win. There are many versions and adaptions of basic educational games . Teachers can take games such as Pictionary, Jeopardy, Casino, and Bingo then adapt them to their needs. 

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Free interactive teaching materials

Gamifying your interactive presentation : By integrating into the presentation links to applications like  ClassCraft  or  Kahoot a teacher can quickly launch an interactive digital game. These applications help teachers tailor their own games by adding their questions, facts, and materials for individuals, small teams, or the whole class to participate.

5. Discussions and groups breakout sessions

Having the class only listen to a lecture marks the end of any interactive presentation. Adding sections where students can have an open discussion or breakout sessions can help students learn from each other, share insights, and have an opportunity to ask questions to their peers. It is also an opportunity for the teacher to take a break from talking and help small groups or students individually as the rest of the class converse.

Taking the discussion online for interactive presentations : Live discussion applications like  NowComment  allow students to markup and discuss a text in real-time which is great for peer-review activities and gather student input into one place quickly. Alternatively, Yo Tech is great for teachers to create and moderate real-time chat rooms. Students can send text-like messages, reply to other messages, and share pictures and drawings. Online chat groups are a great way for large groups of students to collaborate and interact in one place while keeping the noise level down in a classroom.

Tips for Creating Interactive Presentations

Here are some tips when creating a presentation that has interactive components:

Add in places within your lecture notes or presentation slides reminders for you to engage the audience. This could be a small image or phrase. When using digital whiteboards or other display technology you could also use a sound, empty slide, or pop-up link to prompt you to start.

Time Limits

It is great to keep going a good game or discussion in the class where everyone is really engaged. However, keep the maximum amount of time you can dedicate to these activities in mind. Have a watch or a timer on hand and keep things moving. Give enough time for students to get engaged without overdoing it. Spread out chances for students to talk and share. When it is time to move on to the next topic prepare a transition to the next part of the presentation.

Think of ways to let all students have a chance to share. You can select students randomly or have them take turns in some kind of order. Remind students that this is a learning activity and not everyone will get it right the first time. The interactive activity should be open and inclusive. Students who are introverted may be given activities that can be done without going to the front of the class or public speaking.

Benefits of Having Interactive Components in Your Presentation

• Retention:  Actively having students engage with the concepts of the presentation in different ways and hearing it from different people (besides the teacher) helps with long-term retention.
• Personalization:  Students are given the choice of where the presentation is heading and participate in their own learning outcomes.
• Fun:  Having a break from the routine, getting a chance to move around, developing teams, and sharing are all much better than sitting silently and taking notes. 
• Feedback:  Adding interactive activities into a presentation gives you instant feedback about students’ comprehension.
• Vocalization: Having students actually vocalize their ideas helps them internalize the concepts.
• Summarization: Students review and summarize their own main points while doing the activities so there is less need for repetition.

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Learning Solutions For the Future

Build Your Own Version of Interactive Presentations for Your Next Lesson

Bringing in the interactive components and increasing the engagement of your presentations will both help you – a teacher – and your students. Make presentations both educational and entertaining with Edutainment! With or without technology, consider incorporating some new ideas into your next interactive presentation.

If you liked reading this article, you might also want to explore our complete guide to technology in the classroom or gain more insights on engaging lessons with ViewSonic’s education solutions.  

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35 Fantastic Free Google Slides Templates and Themes for Teachers

Add some pizzazz to your presentations!

Google Slides is free, easy to use, and offers so many cool options. These free Google Slides templates for teachers give you endless ways to use this essential tool in your classroom. Choose a few to customize now!

More Google Slides goodness:

• Google Slides 101: Tips and Tricks Every Teacher Needs To Know
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Planets Research Guide

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Secret Sight Words

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Newspaper Theme

Extra, extra, read all about it! Whatever today’s teaching topic is, it’s sure to be headline news with this fun template theme.

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Happy Birthday

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Interactive Jeopardy!

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Desktop Organizer Calendar

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Alphabet Order Game

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Galaxy Theme

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Bulletin Board Theme

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Breakout Room Note Taker

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Who’s Who? Game

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Use these farm animal Google Slides templates to create interactive math or spelling activities for young learners.

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Customize these simple interactive Frayer Model templates with the vocabulary words your students are studying. Then use it for group work or a homework assignment.

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Digital Notebook

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Classroom Assignment Slides

This planner makes a teacher’s life easier. The slides give students one place to access all their assignments, whether group or individual.

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Studying Organizer

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Letter-Writing Slides

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Spelling Choice Boards

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Interactive File Cabinets

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29. Harry Potter Theme

It’s not magic, though it might seem like it to muggles! These Google Slides templates are sure to enchant your students.

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Google Search Theme

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Google Classroom has a lot to offer teachers and students. Check out these Amazing Free Sites and Apps To Use With Google Classroom .

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Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

Presentation Tips For Students – Show And Tell Like A Pro!

Updated: July 15, 2022

Published: May 4, 2020

Giving a presentation to fellow classmates can be a bit daunting, especially if you are new to oral and visual presenting. But with the right PowerPoint tips, public speaking skills, and plenty of practice, you can present like a pro at your upcoming presentation. Here, we’ve laid out the best college presentation tips for students. And once you have one successful presentation, you’ll get better each time!

The Best Presentation Tips for Students

1. arrive early and be technically prepared.

Get to the room early and make sure you leave plenty of time for technical set up and technical difficulties. Have several backup drives (including an online version if possible) so that you are prepared for anything!

2. Know More

Be educated on more than just what you are sharing. That way, you can add points, speak candidly and confidently, and be prepared to answer any audience or teacher questions.

3. Share Your Passion With Your Audience

Connect with your audience by showing that you are passionate about your topic. Do this with the right tone, eye contact, and enthusiasm in your speech.

Photo by  Austin Distel  on  Unsplash

4. pace yourself.

When student presenters are nervous, they tend to speed up their speech. This can be a problem, however, because your speed may be distracting, hard to understand, and you may run under your time.

5. Rehearse Thoroughly

Don’t just practice, rehearse your college presentation. Rehearse the entire delivery, including standing up, using gestures, and going through the slides.

6. Show Your Personality

You don’t need to be professional to the point of stiffness during your college presentation . Don’t be afraid to show your personality while presenting. It will make your presentation more interesting, and you will seem more approachable and confident.

7. Improvise

You can’t be 100% certain what will happen during your presentation. If things aren’t exactly as you expected, don’t be afraid to improvise and run off script.

8. Pump Yourself Up

Get yourself excited and full of energy before your college presentation! Your mood sets the tone for your presentation, and if you get excited right before, you will likely carry that throughout and you’ll make your audience excited about your topic as well.

9. Remember To Pause

Pausing not only only prevents filler words and helps you recollect your thoughts, it can also be a powerful indicator of importance within your presentation.

10. Create “Um” Alternatives

Try hard not to use filler words as they make you look unprofessional and uncertain. The best alternatives to “um” “like” and “so” are taking a breath or a silent pause to collect your thoughts.

11. Using Your Hands

Using your hands makes your college presentation more interesting and helps to get your points across. Point at the slide, use common hand gestures, or mimic a motion.

12. Eye Contact

Eye contact is one of the most important presentation tips for students . Many students are nervous, so they look at their notes or their feet. It is important that you show your confidence and engage your audience by making eye contact. The more presentations you give, the more eye contact will feel natural.

13. The Right Tone

The best public speakers vary their tone and pitch throughout their presentation. Try to change it up, and choose the right tone for your message.

Preparing an Effective College Presentation

1. open strong.

Grab your fellow students’ attention by starting strong with a powerful quote, intriguing scenario, or prompt for internal dialogue.

2. Start With A Mind Map

Mind mapping is literally creating a map of the contents of your college presentation. It is a visual representation and flow of your topics and can help you see the big picture, along with smaller details.

Photo by  Teemu Paananen  on  Unsplash

3. edit yourself.

Some students make the mistake of including too much information in their college presentations. Instead of putting all of the information in there, choose the most important or relevant points, and elaborate on the spot if you feel it’s necessary.

4. Tell A Story

People love stories — they capture interest in ways that figures and facts cannot. Make your presentation relatable by including a story, or presenting in a story format.

5. The Power Of Humor

Using humor in your college presentation is one of the best presentation tips for students. Laughter will relax both you and the audience, and make your presentation more interesting

PowerPoint Tips for Students

1. use key phrases.

Choose a few key phrases that remain throughout your PowerPoint presentation. These should be phrases that really illustrate your point, and items that your audience will remember afterwards.

2. Limit Number Of Slides

Having too many slides will cause you to feel you need to rush through them to finish on time. Instead, include key points on a slide and take the time to talk about them. Try to think about including one slide per one minute of speech.

3. Plan Slide Layouts

Take some time to plan out how information will be displayed on your PowerPoint. Titles should be at the top, and bullets underneath. You may want to add title slides if you are changing to a new topic.

Photo by  NeONBRAND  on  Unsplash

4. the right fonts.

Choose an easy-to-read font that isn’t stylized. Sans serif fonts tend to be easier to read when they are large. Try to stick to only two different fonts as well to keep the presentation clean.

5. Choosing Colors And Images

When it comes to colors, use contrasting ones: light on dark or dark on light. Try to choose a few main colors to use throughout the presentation. Choose quality images, and make sure to provide the source for the images.

6. Use Beautiful Visual Aids

Keep your presentation interesting and your audience awake by adding visual aids to your PowerPoint. Add captivating photos, data representations, or infographics to illustrate your information.

7. Don’t Read Straight From Your Notes

When you read straight from your notes, your tone tends to remain monotonous, you don’t leave much room for eye contact. Try looking up often, or memorizing portions of your presentation.

8. Avoid Too Much Text

PowerPoint was made for images and bullets, not for your entire speech to be written in paragraph form. Too much text can lose your adiences’ interest and understanding.

9. Try A Theme

Choosing the right theme is one of those presentation tips for students that is often overlooked. When you find the right theme, you keep your college presentation looking interesting, professional, and relevant.

10. Be Careful With Transitions And Animations

Animations and transitions can add a lot to your presentation, but don’t add to many or it will end up being distracting.

Public Speaking Tips for Students

1. choose your topic wisely.

If you are able to pick your topic, try to pick something that interests you and something that you want to learn about. Your interest will come through your speech.

2. Visit The Room Beforehand

If your presentation is being held somewhere outside of class, try to visit the location beforehand to prep your mind and calm your nerves.

3. Practice Makes Perfect

Practice, practice, practice! The only way you will feel fully confident is by practicing many times, both on your own and in front of others.

Photo by  Product School  on  Unsplash

4. talk to someone about anxiety.

If you feel anxious about your college presentation, tell someone. It could be a friend, family member, your teacher, or a counselor. They will be able to help you with some strategies that will work best for you.

5. Remind Yourself Of Your Audience

Remember, you are presenting to your peers! They all likely have to make a presentation too at some point, and so have been or will be in the same boat. Remembering that your audience is on your side will help you stay cool and collected.

6. Observe Other Speakers

Look at famous leaders, or just other students who typically do well presenting. Notice what they are doing and how you can adapt your performance in those ways.

7. Remind Yourself Of Your Message

If you can come up with a central message, or goal, of your college presentation, you can remind yourself of it throughout your speech and let it guide you.

8. Don’t Apologize

If you make a mistake, don’t apologize. It is likely that no one even noticed! If you do feel you need to point out your own mistake, simply say it and keep moving on with your presentation. No need to be embarrassed, it happens even to the best presenters!

When you smile, you appear warm and inviting as a speaker. You will also relax yourself with your own smile.

The Bottom Line

It can be nerve racking presenting as a college student, but if you use our presentation tips for students, preparing and presenting your college presentation will be a breeze!

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9 PowerPoint Presentation Tips for Students

Create classroom presentations worthy of an 'A'

• Brock University

Making effective classroom presentations takes practice. When you follow a few PowerPoint presentation tips for students, you'll be up to the challenge. These presentation tips refer to PowerPoint slides (all versions) and can be applied to any type of slide presentation.

Plan Your Slide Layout

Make your slides easy to follow. Put the title at the top where your audience expects to find it. Phrases should read left to right and top to bottom. Keep important information near the top of the slide. Often the bottom portions of slides cannot be seen from the back rows because heads are in the way.

Avoid Fancy Fonts

Choose a font that is simple and easy to read, such as Arial, Times New Roman, or Verdana. You may have a really cool font on your computer, but save it for other uses. Often, fancy fonts aren't easy to read on a screen and distract more than anything.

Don't use more than two different fonts , one for headings and another for content. Keep all fonts large enough (at least 18 pt and preferably 24 pt) so that people at the back of the room can easily read the text.

Use Contrasting Colors for Text and Background

Dark text on a light background is best. This combination offers the most visibility. Sometimes, though, you may want a dark background for effect, to dazzle the crowd. In that case, make the text a light color for easy reading in a classroom presentation.

Text is often difficult to read on patterned or textured backgrounds. Keep the color scheme consistent throughout your classroom presentation.

Keep Slide Design Consistent With a Theme

When you use a design theme, choose one that won't detract from your classroom presentation. Also, keep the slide design consistent with that theme. Test it ahead of time to make sure that the text is readable and that the graphics don't get lost in the background.

Use Footnotes to Add Information

Adding footnotes to the slides in a PowerPoint presentation allows you to document the sources of information you used in your research, just as you would if you were turning in a research paper. Use footnotes to cite quotes and statistics or to add extra details related to the text on the slide.

Print Out Speaker Notes

Reading a PowerPoint presentation in front of a class can be nerve-wracking. Printing your slides with speaker notes allows you to have thumbnails, text, and written notes, if you wish, so you can read along with the slides and add pertinent information. You can also use the printed slides as handouts for the class. Alternatively, you might want to add a voiceover to the slideshow to avoid speaking in class altogether.

Run a Presentation Unattended

There might be times when you want the slideshow to run on its own in a continuous loop, such as part of a science fair presentation. Using the Browsed at Kiosk setting when setting up the presentation lets you show the presentation unattended.

Use Animations and Transition Effects Sparingly

Who doesn't love to apply animations, transitions , or GIFs to a presentation? Going overboard with these elements can be entertaining, but rarely will the audience be paying attention to the message of the presentation. The slideshow is a visual aid and not the objective of the classroom presentation.

Convert PowerPoint Shows to Google Slides

Schools often use the Google suite of productivity applications, such as Google Slides, in the classroom. If you have PowerPoint at home, you can use it to create a presentation and share it with your teacher or others using Google Slides.

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College Minor: Everything You Need to Know

14 fascinating teacher interview questions for principals, tips for success if you have a master’s degree and can’t find a job, 14 ways young teachers can get that professional look, which teacher supplies are worth the splurge, 8 business books every teacher should read, conditional admission: everything you need to know, college majors: everything you need to know, 7 things principals can do to make a teacher observation valuable, 3 easy teacher outfits to tackle parent-teacher conferences, 8 must-have classroom presentation apps and tools.

It’s important for teachers to master the art of presenting engaging lectures that keep kids interested in the material as the weeks wear on. However, it’s equally important for students to master the same trade. As kids progress through school, higher education and, eventually, their professional lives, they’ll need tools besides PowerPoint to effectively pitch ideas and communicate dense material to seminars of bored classmates.

We’re breaking down 8 must-have presentation apps to help both teachers and students find their inner aesthetic and create drool-proof, prize-winning presentations.

• Board Builder : Board Builder acts like a digital poster board that allows teachers and students to begin with a blank canvas and personalize presentations. Customize backgrounds, add imagery, video clips, documents, change fonts, and tie everything together with built-in color schemes that keep slides both engaging and aesthetically pleasing.
• Emaze : With everything that teachers have on their plates – from lesson plans to addressing behavioral problems to making sure struggling students receive extra help – it’s understandable that there’s little time left to customize every presentation. Emaze is an easy , user-friendly presentation app that allows creators to plug in lesson information and aesthetic preferences and watch as built-in templates take over. Choose from learning aids, 3D imagery, transitions, and presentation formats that look professionally crafted. The software is also cloud-based, so Emaze presentations can be edited from any device online.
• Powtoon : Ask any marketing professional how to capture the attention of millennials, and they’ll say video Start thinking of your students like consumers who have hours and hours of advertisement thrown at them every second because, with a smartphone in reach, it’s true that students have content they’d rather be focusing on. It’s your job to grab their attention and, like the best marketing strategists, create custom videos. Powtoon allows users to create animated videos that grab everyone’s immediate attention easily. When was the last time your kids watched a personalized, animated video outlining photosynthesis?
• Educreations : In the same video vein, Educreations is an interactive white board that captures a teacher’s voice and handwriting to create shareable video lessons. Educreations is perfect for struggling students who like going through the material with teachers one-on-one, but still, need refreshers after the review session ends. Educreations records the session and lets students replay the video afterward to review every detail of their personalized instruction.
• Haiku Deck : Another user-friendly tool is Haiku Deck. Haiku Deck includes thousands of templates that teachers and students can build from to create slides with fonts that coincide and color schemes that correlate. It’s almost impossible not to create something beautiful, neat and aesthetically pleasing. If you’re in need of charts but don’t have time to master Excel, Haiku Deck lets you pick from templates of different charts and customize them to mirror your own data.
• Prezi : Prezi is a free tool that takes PowerPoints to the next level. If you’re in a rush, you can import previously created PowerPoints into Prezi and watch as your once plain presentation gets new movement and flare. Otherwise, Prezi lets you create a unique presentation from scratch. Zoom in on images, zoom out to reveal larger backgrounds for dramatic effect, easily incorporate audio components, and choose from endless themes. If you’re struggling for inspiration, Prezi offers suggestions and interesting tools that help boost even the most boring series of slides.
• ClickShare : Is your classroom prone to technical troubles? No IT professional on site? ClickShare is a wireless presentation and collaboration tool that projects slides from any device with the touch of a button. Connecting slides to projectors is so easy that a glitch will never delay the start of a presentation in your classroom again. ClickShare also fosters collaboration, letting multiple students and teachers work together on different accounts. If you want to be there while students master the art of presentations, monitor their progress and provide input when students begin struggling.
• DyKnow : DyKnow allows teachers to create SMART boards from any ordinary whiteboard. The tool opens like PowerPoint and allows teachers to write on computers using special pens while projecting the presentation to students in real time. Students can view presentations on their personal devices and, to be sure students are actually watching, teachers have the power to block websites so students can only access presentations. Have students out sick? Save presentations to a server and kids can access them anytime, anywhere.

With the smartphone and tablet and VR phenomenon exploding from generation to generation, kids have more distractions than ever before. That means teachers today face an especially tough challenge in keeping kids’ attention towards their lesson plans and away from a separate screen sitting in backpacks and laps.

If students are bored with PowerPoint, Google Slides, and other generic presentation tools, WOW them with video, audio, and imagery that mirrors the content they spend hours watching on YouTube and Netflix. As teachers learn to master the art of engagement, kids will inevitably learn by example and begin creating powerhouse presentations of their own.

Disclosure: This preceding post was sponsored. We were compensated by the sponsoring company, and consider this to be an advertisement. However, we only endorse or recommend services or products that we think would be a good fit for our readership. We are disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Educators Blog

10 online tools to help you create beautiful classroom presentations.

By DefinedSTEM,

By Gloria Kopp

Slideshows and presentations, whether they are PowerPoint or otherwise, are a great way to introduce new concepts and educate your students in new and exciting ways so they can grasp the data a lot easier.

Most children these days are very visual learners and instead of having teachers stand at the front of the class simply relaying information out of a textbook, using a PowerPoint presentation is a great way to make things easier and a lot easier to understand.

However, having a poorly made presentation or slideshow is only going to make things even more difficult to understand. So you can create the best quality presentations, here are 10 tools you can use at home or even with your class in the lessons!

Glogster is a leading multimedia creation app which works online to help you create interactive posters that can be used in your presentations, slideshows and individually to convey any information you want to convey professionally and in an easy to read format.

Marketed as one of the best things to happen to the presentation industry, Prezi is ideal for creating high-quality presentations to use for any subject you can think of, whether it’s from scratch or using any of the pre-made templates. One of the leading features is the incredibly easy to use drag and drop function.

A free online tool that offers high-quality presentation templates. The easy-to-navigate platform allows you to create, edit and share presentations with your colleagues quickly and easily.

Within your presentations, it’s sometimes a lot easier to use videos to explain certain points or to share videos that your class may have made during a few lessons. Animoto is an easy way to create beautiful videos from clips or photos organized into a slideshow format.

Easy Word Count

A free online tool you can use when creating the written content for your presentations. When creating presentations, you need to make sure that the information isn’t just blocked onto the presentation but is more like notes. Use this tool to track that you aren’t writing too much.

State of Writing

When writing the content for your presentations, you want to make sure that the text is correct, both factually and in the sense of the way, it’s written, such as grammar and punctuation. Of course, it’s easy to overlook these things when creating a visual presentation, which is where State of Writing can help.

In regard to your written content, when it’s all written out and just before you do your final proofreading checks, you’ll want to make sure that you’re communicating the message that you want to communicate. When it comes to editing, use this tool to teach you everything you need to know.

An online movie maker where you can stitch together clips, movies and photos into one clip that you can add to your presentation to create a new visual style of learning within your classes.

An easy to use and 100% free slideshow maker you can start using directly from your web browser to create high-quality presentations for your class or with the help of your students. This is a great tool for teaching students how to make their own presentations.

Boom Essays

A professional online writing tool you can use to help you proofread your presentation slides and content to make sure that it’s free from errors and reads well, ensuring the highest quality content.

This is a free online tool you can use for adding citations, references and quotes to your presentation in a professional format so they are easy to read, contain all the information that professional quotes should have and have the maximum amount of educational value.

As you can see, there is a wealth of tools available at your disposal that you can use when creating presentations for your class to make it yet while making sure everything is perfect for the best educational experience.

Gloria Kopp is an educator and a tutor at  Academized . She shares her tutorials and guides at HuffingtonPost , Engadget, Microsoft and  Paper Fellows  blogs. Gloria is also an author of  Studydemic  educational project for students and educators

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Scientific Presenting: Using Evidence-Based Classroom Practices to Deliver Effective Conference Presentations

Lisa a. corwin.

† Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309

Amy Prunuske

‡ Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Medical College of Wisconsin–Central Wisconsin, Wausau, WI 54401

Shannon B. Seidel

§ Biology Department, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA 98447

Scientific presenting is the use of scientific teaching principles—active learning, equity, and assessment—in conference presentations to improve learning, engagement, and inclusiveness. This essay presents challenges presenters face and suggestions for how presenters can incorporate active learning strategies into their scientific presentations.

Scientists and educators travel great distances, spend significant time, and dedicate substantial financial resources to present at conferences. This highlights the value placed on conference interactions. Despite the importance of conferences, very little has been studied about what is learned from the presentations and how presenters can effectively achieve their goals. This essay identifies several challenges presenters face when giving conference presentations and discusses how presenters can use the tenets of scientific teaching to meet these challenges. We ask presenters the following questions: How do you engage the audience and promote learning during a presentation? How do you create an environment that is inclusive for all in attendance? How do you gather feedback from the professional community that will help to further advance your research? These questions target three broad goals that stem from the scientific teaching framework and that we propose are of great importance at conferences: learning, equity, and improvement. Using a backward design approach, we discuss how the lens of scientific teaching and the use of specific active-learning strategies can enhance presentations, improve their utility, and ensure that a presentation is broadly accessible to all audience members.

Attending a conference provides opportunities to share new discoveries, cutting-edge techniques, and inspiring research within a field of study. Yet after presenting at some conferences, you might leave feeling as though you did not connect with the audience, did not receive useful feedback, or are unsure of where you fit within the professional community. Deciding what to cover in a presentation may be daunting, and you may worry that the audience did not engage in your talk. Likewise, for audience members, the content of back-to-back talks may blur together, and they may get lost in acronyms or other unfamiliar jargon. Audience members who are introverted or new to the field may feel intimidated about asking a question in front of a large group containing well-known, outspoken experts. After attending a conference, one may leave feeling curious and excited or exhausted and overwhelmed, wondering what was gained from presenting or attending.

Conferences vary widely in purpose and location, ranging from small conferences hosted within home institutions to large international conferences featuring experts from around the world. The time and money spent to host, attend, and present at conferences speaks to the value placed on engaging in these professional interactions. Despite the importance of conferences to professional life, there is rarely time to reflect on what presenters and other conference attendees learn from participating in conferences or how conferences promote engagement and equity in the field as a whole. A significant portion of most conference time is devoted to the delivery of oral presentations, which traditionally are delivered in a lecture style, with questions being initiated by a predictable few during question-and-answer sessions.

In this essay, we discuss how you can use a backward design approach and scientific presenting strategies to overcome three key challenges to effectively presenting to diverse conference audiences. The challenges we consider here include the following:

• Engagement in learning: ensuring that your audience is engaged and retains what is important from a talk
• Promoting equity: creating an environment that is inclusive of all members of the research field
• Receiving feedback: gathering input from the professional community to improve as a researcher and presenter

At conferences, learning and advancement of a field is paramount, similar to more formal educational settings. Thus, we wrote these presenting challenges to align with the central themes presented in the scientific teaching framework developed by Handelsman and colleagues (2007) . “Learning” aligns with “active learning,” “equity” with “diversity,” and “feedback” with “assessment.” Using the scientific teaching framework and a backward design approach, we propose using evidence-based teaching strategies for scientific presenting in order to increase learning, equity, and quality feedback. We challenge you , the presenter, to consider how these strategies might benefit your future presentations.

BACKWARD DESIGN YOUR PRESENTATION: GOALS AND AUDIENCE CONSIDERATIONS

How will you define the central goals of your presentation and frame your presentation based on these goals? Begin with the end in mind by clearly defining your presentation goals before developing content and activities. This is not unlike the process of backward design used to plan effective learning experiences for students ( McTighe and Thomas, 2003 ). Consider what you, as a presenter, want to accomplish. You may want to share results supporting a novel hypothesis that may impact the work of colleagues in your field or disseminate new techniques or methodologies that could be applied more broadly. You may seek feedback about an ongoing project. Also consider your audience and what you hope they will gain from attending. You may want to encourage your colleagues to think in new and different ways or to create an environment of collegiality. It is good to understand your audience’s likely goals, interests, and professional identities before designing your presentation.

How can you get to know these important factors about your audience? Although it may not be possible to predict or know all aspects of your audience, identify sources of information you can access to learn more about them. Conference organizers, the website for the conference, and previous attendees may be good sources of information about who might be in attendance. Conference organizers may have demographic information about the institution types and career stages of the audience. The website for a conference or affiliated society often describes the mission of the organization or conference. Finally, speaking with individuals who have previously attended the conference may help you understand the culture and expectations of your audience. This information may enable you to tailor your talk and select strategies that will engage and resonate with audience members of diverse backgrounds. Most importantly, reflecting on the information you gather will allow you to evaluate and better define your presentation goals.

Before designing your presentation, write between two and five goals you have for yourself or your audience (see Vignettes 1 and 2 for sample goals). Prioritize your goals and evaluate which can be accomplished with the time, space, and audience constraints you face. Once you have established both your goals and knowledge of who might attend your talk, it is time to design your talk. The Scientific Presenting section that follows offers specific design suggestions to engage the audience in learning, promote equity, and receive high-quality feedback.

Situation: Mona Harrib has been asked to give the keynote presentation at a regional biology education research conference. As a leader in the field, Mona is well known and respected, and she has a good grasp on where the field has been and where it is going now.

Presentation Goals: She has three goals she wants to accomplish with her presentation: 1) to introduce her colleagues to the self-efficacy framework, 2) to provide new members of her field opportunities to learn about where the field has been, and 3) to connect these new individuals with others in the field.

Scientific Presenting Strategy: Mona has 50 minutes for her presentation, with 10 minutes for questions. Her opening slide, displayed as people enter the room, encourages audience members to “sit next to someone you have not yet spoken to.” Because her talk will discuss self-efficacy theory and the various origins of students’ confidence in their ability to do science, she begins by asking the audience members to introduce themselves to their neighbors and to describe an experience in which they felt efficacious or confident in their ability to do something and why they felt confident.  She circulates around the room, and asks five groups to share their responses. This provides an audience-generated foundation that she uses to explain the framework in more detail. For historical perspective, she relates each framework component back to prior research in the field. She ends with some recent work from her research group and asks participants to discuss with their partners how the framework could be used to explain the results of her recent study. She again gathers and reports several examples to the whole group that illustrate ways in which the data might be interpreted. She then asks the audience to write a question that they still have about this research on note cards, which she collects and reviews after the presentation. After reviewing the cards, she decides to incorporate a little more explanation about a few graphs in her work to help future audiences digest the information.

Situation: Antonio Villarreal is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, who has recently been selected for a 15-minute presentation in the Endocytic Trafficking Minisymposium at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting. He has attended this conference twice, so he has a sense of the audience, space, and culture of the meeting. In his past experiences, he has found that the talks often blur together, and it is especially difficult to remember key ideas from the later talks in each session.

Presentation Goals: With a manuscript in preparation and his upcoming search for a faculty position, Antonio has the following three goals for his presentation: 1) to highlight the significance of his research in a memorable way; 2) to keep the audience engaged, because his presentation is the ninth out of 10 talks; and 3) to receive feedback that will prepare him to give professional job talks.

Scientific Presenting Strategy: Antonio took a class as a postdoctoral fellow about evidence-based practices in teaching and decides he would like to incorporate some active learning into his talk to help his audience learn. He worries that with only 15 minutes he does not have a lot of time to spare. So he sets up the background and experimental design for the audience and then projects only the two axes of his most impactful graph on the screen with a question mark in the middle where the data would be. Rather than simply showing the result, he asks the audience to turn to a neighbor and make a prediction about the results they expect to see. He cues the audience to talk to one another by encouraging them to make a bold prediction! After 30 seconds, he quells the chatter and highlights two different predictions he heard from audience members before sharing the results. At the end of his presentation, he asks the audience to turn to a neighbor once again and discuss what the results mean and what experiment they would try next. He also invites them to talk further with him after the session. The questions Antonio receives after his talk are very interesting and help him consider alternative angles he could pursue or discuss during future talks. He also asks his colleague Jenna to record his talk on his iPhone, and he reviews this recording after the session to prepare him for the job market.

SCIENTIFIC PRESENTING: USING A SCIENTIFIC TEACHING PERSPECTIVE TO DESIGN CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Presenters, like teachers, often try to help their audiences connect new information with what they already know ( National Research Council, 2000 ). While a conference audience differs from a student audience, evidence and strategies collected from the learning sciences can assist in designing presentations to maximize learning and engagement. We propose that the scientific teaching framework, developed by Handelsman and colleagues (2007) to aid in instructional design, can be used as a tool in developing presentations that promote learning, are inclusive, and allow for the collection of useful feedback. In this section, we discuss the three pillars of scientific teaching: active learning, diversity, and assessment. We outline how they can be used to address the central challenges outlined earlier and provide specific tips and strategies for applying scientific teaching in a conference setting.

Challenge: Engagement in Learning

Consider the last conference you attended: How engaged were you in the presentations? How many times did you check your phone or email? How much did you learn from the talks you attended? Professional communities are calling for more compelling presentations that convey information successfully to a broad audience (e.g., Carlson and Burdsall, 2014 ; Langin, 2017 ). Active-learning strategies, when combined with constructivist approaches, are one way to increase engagement, learning, and retention ( Prince, 2004 ; Freeman et al. , 2014 ). While active-learning strategies are not mutually exclusive with the use of PowerPoint presentations in the dissemination of information, they do require thoughtful design, time for reflection, and interaction to achieve deeper levels of learning ( Chi and Wylie, 2014 ). This may be as simple as allowing 30–60 seconds for prediction or discussion in a 15-minute talk. On the basis of calls for change from conference goers and organizers and research on active-learning techniques, we have identified several potential benefits of active learning likely to enhance engagement in conference presentations:

• Active learning increases engagement and enthusiasm. Active learning allows learners to maintain focus and enthusiasm throughout a learning experience (e.g., Michael, 2006 ). Use of active learning may particularly benefit audience members attending long presentations or sessions with back-to-back presenters.
• Active learning improves retention of information. Active reflection and discussion with peers supports incorporation of information into one’s own mental models and creates the connections required for long-term retention of information (reviewed in Prince, 2004 ).
• Active learning allows for increased idea exchange among participants. Collaborative discourse among individuals with differing views enhances learning, promotes argumentation, and allows construction of new knowledge ( Osborne, 2010 ). Active-learning approaches foster idea exchange and encourage interaction, allowing audience members to hear various perspectives from more individuals.
• Active learning increases opportunities to build relationships and expand networks. Professional networking is important for expansion of professional communities, enhancing collaborations, and fostering idea exchange. Short collaborative activities during presentations can be leveraged to build social networks and foster community in a professional setting, similar to how they are used in instruction ( Kember and Leung, 2005 ; Kuh et al ., 2006 ).

While a multitude of ways to execute active learning exist, we offer a few specific suggestions to quickly engage the audience during a conference presentation ( Table 1 ). In the spirit of backward design, we encourage you to identify learning activities that support attainment of your presentation goals. Some examples can be found in Vignettes 1 and 2 (section 1), which illustrate hypothetical scenarios in which active learning is incorporated into presentations at professional conferences to help meet specific goals.

Active-learning strategies for conference presentations

Similar to giving a practice talk before the conference, we encourage you to test out active-learning strategies in advance, particularly if you plan to incorporate technology, because technological problems can result in disengagement ( Hatch et al ., 2005 ). Practicing presentation activities within a research group or local community will provide guidance on prompts, timing, instructions, and audience interpretation to identify problems and solutions before they occur during a presentation. This will help to avoid activities that are overly complex or not purpose driven ( Andrew et al ., 2011 ).

Challenge: Equity and Participation

Consider the last conference you attended: Did you hear differing opinions about your work or did the dominant paradigms prevail? Who asked questions; was it only high-status experts in the field? Did you hear from multiple voices? Did newer members, like graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, engage with established members of the community? In classroom settings, equity and diversity strategies improve learning among all students and particularly support students from underrepresented groups in science by decreasing feelings of exclusion, alleviating anxiety, and counteracting stereotype threat ( Haak et al ., 2011 ; Walton et al ., 2012 ; Eddy and Hogan, 2014 ). Likewise, in a conference setting, strategies that promote equitable participation and recognize the positive impact of diversity in the field may help increase equity more broadly and promote a sense of belonging among participants. Conference audiences are oftentimes even more diverse than the typical classroom environment, being composed of individuals from different disciplines, career stages, and cultures. Incorporating strategies that increase the audience’s understanding and feelings of inclusion in the professional community may impact whether or not an individual continues to engage in the field. We have identified three central benefits of equity strategies for presenters and their professional communities:

• Equity strategies increase accessibility and learning. As a presenter, you should ensure that presentations and presentation materials 1) allow information to be accessed in various forms, so that differently abled individuals may participate fully, and 2) use straightforward language and representations. You can incorporate accessible versions of conference materials (e.g., captioned videos) or additional resources, such as definitions of commonly used jargon necessary to the presentation (e.g., Miller and Tanner, 2015 ). You may consider defining jargon or acronyms in your talk to increase accessibility for individuals who might struggle to understand the full meaning (e.g., new language learners or individuals who are new to the field).

Equity strategies for conference presentations (as presented in Tanner, 2013 )

• Equity strategies promote a sense of belonging among all individuals. Creating a welcoming, inclusive environment will make the community attractive to new members and help to increase community members’ sense of belonging. Sense of belonging helps individuals in a community to view themselves as valued and important, which serves to motivate these individuals toward productive action. This increases positive affect, boosts overall community morale, and supports community development ( Winter-Collins and McDaniel, 2000 ). Belonging can increase if it is specifically emphasized as important and if individuals make personal connections to others, such as during small-group work (see Table 2 ).

Many strategies discussed in prior sections, such as using active learning and having clear goals, help to promote equity, belonging, and access. In Table 2 , we expand on previously mentioned strategies and discuss how specific active-learning and equity strategies promote inclusiveness. These tips for facilitation are primarily drawn from Tanner’s 2013 feature on classroom structure, though they apply to the conference presentation setting as well.

An overarching goal of conferences is to help build a thriving, creative, inclusive, and accessible community. Being transparent about which equity strategies you are using and why you are using them may help to promote buy-in and encourage others to use similar strategies. By taking the above actions as presenters and being deliberate in our incorporation of equity and diversity strategies, we can help our professional communities to thrive, innovate, and grow.

Challenge: Receiving Feedback

Consider your last conference presentation: What did you take away from the presentation? Did you gather good ideas during the session? Were the questions and comments you received useful for advancing your work? If you were to present this work again, what changes might you make? In the classroom, assessment drives learning of content, concepts, and skills. At conferences, we, as presenters, take the role of instructor in teaching our peers (including members of our research field) about new findings and innovations. However, assessment at conferences differs from classroom assessment in important ways. First, at conferences, you are unlikely to present to the same audience multiple times; therefore, the focus of the assessment is purely formative—to determine whether the presentation accomplished its goals. This feedback can aid in your professional development toward being an effective communicator. Second, at conferences, you are speaking to a diverse group of colleagues who have varied expertise, and feedback from the audience will provide information that may improve your research. Indeed, conferences are a prime environment to draw on a diversity of expertise to identify relevant information, resources, and alternative interpretations of data. These characteristics of conferences give rise to three possible types of presentation assessments ( Hattie and Timperley, 2007 ):

• Feed-up: assessment of the achievement of presentation goals: Did I achieve my goals as a presenter?
• Feed-back: assessment of whether progress toward project goals is being achieved: Is my disciplinary work or research progressing effectively?
• Feed-forward: input on which activities should be undertaken next: What are the most important next steps in this work for myself and my professional community?

Though a lot of feedback at conferences occurs in informal settings, you can take the initiative to incorporate assessment strategies into your presentation. Many of the simple classroom techniques described in the preceding sections, like polling the audience and hearing from multiple voices, support quick assessment of presentation outcomes ( Angelo and Cross, 1993 ). In Table 3 , we elaborate on possible assessment strategies and provide tips for gathering effective feedback during presentations.

Assessment and feedback strategies for conference presentations

a We suggest these questions for a simple, yet informative postpresentation feed-up survey about your presentation: What did you find most interesting about this presentation? What, if anything, was unclear or were you confused about (a.k.a. muddiest point)? What is one thing that would improve this presentation? Similarly, to gather information for a feedback/feed-forward assessment, we recommend: What did you find most interesting about this work? What about this project needs improvement or clarification? What do you consider an important next step that this work might take?

Technology can assist in implementing assessment, and we predict that there will be many future technological innovations applicable to the conference setting. Live tweeting or backchanneling is occurring more frequently alongside presentations, with specific hashtags that allow audience members to initiate discussions and generate responses from people who are not even in the room ( Wilkinson et al ., 2015 ). After the presentation, you and your audience members can continue to share feedback and materials through email list servers and QR codes. Self-assessment by reviewing a video from the session can support both a better understanding of audience engagement and self-reflection ( van Ginkel et al ., 2015 ). There are benefits from gathering data from multiple assessment strategies, but as we will discuss in the next section, there are barriers that impact the number of recommended learning, equity, and assessment strategies you might chose to implement.

NAVIGATING BARRIERS TO SCIENTIFIC PRESENTING

Though we are strong advocates for a scientific presenting approach, there are several important barriers to consider. These challenges are similar to what is faced in the classroom, including time, space, professional culture, and audience/student expectations.

One of the most important barriers to consider is culture, as reflected in the following quote:

Ironically, the oral presentations are almost always presented as lectures, even when the topic of the talk is about how lecturing is not very effective! This illustrates how prevalent and influential the assumptions are about the expected norms of behavior and interaction at a scientific conference. Even biologists who have strong teaching identities and are well aware of more effective ways to present findings choose, for whatever reason (professional culture? professional identity?), not to employ evidence-based teaching and communication methods in the venue of a scientific conference. ( Brownell and Tanner, 2012 , p. 344)

As this quote suggests, professional identity and power structures exist within conference settings that may impact the use of scientific presenting strategies. Trainees early in their careers will be impacted by disciplinary conference norms and advisor expectations and should discuss incorporating new strategies with a trusted mentor. In addition, incorporating scientific presenting strategies can decrease your control as a presenter and may even invoke discomfort and threaten your or your audience’s professional identities.

Balance between content delivery and active engagement presents another potential barrier. Some may be concerned that active learning takes time away from content delivery or that using inclusive practices compromises the clarity of a central message. Indeed, there is a trade-off between content and activity, and presenters have to balance presenting more results with time spent on active learning that allows the audience to interpret the results. We suggest that many of these difficulties can be solved by focusing on your goals and audience background, which will allow you to identify which content is critical and hone your presentation messaging to offer the maximum benefit to the audience. Remember that coverage of content does not ensure learning or understanding and that you can always refer the audience to additional content or clarifying materials by providing handouts or distributing weblinks to help them engage as independent learners.

Physical space and time may limit participants’ interaction with you and one another. Try to view your presentation space in advance and consider how you will work within and possibly modify that space. For example, if you will present in a traditional lecture hall, choose active learning that can be completed by an individual or pairs instead of a group. By being aware of the timing, place in the conference program, and space allotted, you can identify appropriate activities and strategies that will fit your presentation and have a high impact. Available technology, support, and resources will also impact the activities and assessments you can implement and may alleviate some space and time challenges.

As novice scientific presenters dealing with the above barriers and challenges, “failures” or less than ideal attempts at scientific presenting are bound to occur. The important thing to remember is that presenting is a scientific process, and just as experiments rarely work perfectly the first time they are executed, so too does presenting in a new and exciting way. Just as in science, challenges and barriers can be overcome with time, iterations, and thoughtful reflection.

STRUCTURING A CONFERENCE TO FACILITATE SCIENTIFIC PRESENTING

Although presenters can opt to use backward design and incorporate scientific presenting strategies, they do not control other variables like the amount of time allotted to each speaker, the size or shape of the room they present in, or the technology available. These additional constraints are still important and may impact a presenter’s ability to use audience-centered presentation methods. Conference organizers are in a powerful position to support presenters’ ability to implement the described strategies and to provide the necessary logistical support to maximize the likelihood of success. Organizers often set topics, determine the schedule, book spaces, identify presenters, and help establish conference culture.

So how can conference organizers affect change that will promote active engagement and equity in conference presentations?

• Use backward design for the conference as a whole. Just as presenters can use backward design to set their specific learning goals, conference organizers can set goals for the meeting as a whole to support the conference community.
• Vary conference structures and formats based on the needs of the community. Conference presentation structures vary widely, but it is worth considering why certain session structures are used. To what extent does it serve the community to have back-to-back 10-minute talks for several hours? Many people will have the chance to present, but does the audience gain anything? Are there topics that would be better presented in a workshop format or a roundtable discussion? What other structures might benefit the conference community and their goals?
• Choose a space that is conducive to active presentations or consider creative ways to use existing spaces. The spaces available for conferences are typically designed for lecture formats. However, organizers can seek out spaces that facilitate active presenting by choosing rooms with adaptable formats in which furniture can be moved to facilitate small-group discussions. They can also provide tips on how to work within existing spaces, such as encouraging participants to sit near the front of a lecture hall or auditorium.
• Give explicit expectations to presenters. Organizers could inform presenters that active, engaging, evidence-based sessions are encouraged or expected. This will help cultivate the use of scientific presenting within the community.
• Provide examples or support for presenters to aid in design of active learning, equity strategies, and assessment. Videos with examples of the described techniques, a quick reference guide, or access to experts within the field who would be willing to mentor presenters could be critical for supporting a conference culture that uses scientific presenting. For example, researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a repository of active-learning videos and instructions for instructors interested in developing these skills (REALISE—Repository for Envisioning Active-Learning Instruction in Science Education, https://seercenter.uga.edu/ realisevideos_howto ).
• Collect evidence about conference structure and use it to inform changes. Surveying audience members and presenters to better understand the benefits and challenges of particular session formats can help inform changes over multiple years. Organizers should coordinate these efforts with presenters so they are aware of what data will be collected and disseminated back to them.

Although scientific teaching has increasingly become standard practice for evidence-based teaching of science courses, there are potentially great benefits for transforming our oral presentations in science and science education by incorporating the rigor, critical thinking, and experimentation that are regularly employed within research. The strategies suggested in this paper can serve as a starting point for experimentation and evaluation of presentation and conference efficacy. Using scientific presentation strategies may expedite the advancement of fields by increasing engagement and learning at conference presentations. Equity strategies can increase inclusion and community building among members of our research areas, which will help research fields to grow and diversify. Finally, regularly incorporating assessment into our presentations should improve the quality and trajectory of research projects, further strengthening the field. Both individual presenters and conference organizers have a role to play in shifting conference culture to tackle the challenges presented in this paper. We urge you to consider your role in taking action.

Acknowledgments

We thank Justin Hines, Jenny Knight, and Kimberly Tanner for thoughtful suggestions on early drafts of this article.

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The 8 Types of Presentation Styles: Which Category Do You Fall Into?

Updated: December 16, 2020

Published: September 24, 2018

Types of Presentations

• Visual Style
• Freeform Style
• Instructor Style
• Coach Style
• Storytelling Style
• Connector Style
• Lessig Style
• Takahashi Style

Everyone on the internet has an opinion on how to give the “perfect” presentation.

One group champions visual aids, another thinks visual aids are a threat to society as we know it. One expert preaches the benefits of speaking loudly, while another believes the softer you speak the more your audience pays attention. And don’t even try to find coordinating opinions on whether you should start your presentation with a story, quote, statistic, or question.

But what if there wasn’t just one “right” way to give a presentation? What if there were several? Below, I’ve outlined eight types of presentation styles. They’re used by famous speakers like Steve Jobs and Al Gore -- and none of them are wrong.

Check out each one and decide which will be most effective for you.

Types of Presentation Styles

1. visual style.

What it is: If you’re a firm believer slides simply exist to complement your talking points, this style is for you. With this speaking style, you might need to work a little harder to get your audience engaged, but the dividends can be huge for strong public speakers, visionaries, and storytellers.

When to use it: This style is helpful when speaking to a large audience with broad interests. It’s also great for when you need to throw together slides quickly.

Visual style presenter: Steve Jobs

2. Freeform Style

What it is: This impromptu style of presenting doesn’t require slides. Instead, the speaker relies on strong stories to illustrate each point. This style works best for those who have a short presentation time and are extremely familiar with their talking points.

When to use it: Elevator pitches, networking events, and impromptu meetings are all scenarios in which to use a freeform style of speaking. You’ll appear less rehearsed and more conversational than if you were to pause in the middle of a happy hour to pull up your presentation on a tablet.

Freeform style presenter: Sir Ken Robinson

3. Instructor Style

What it is: This presentation style allows you to deliver complex messages using figures of speech, metaphors, and lots of content -- just like your teachers and professors of old. Your decks should be built in logical order to aid your presentation, and you should use high-impact visuals to support your ideas and keep the audience engaged.

When to use it: If you’re not a comfortable presenter or are unfamiliar with your subject matter (i.e., your product was recently updated and you’re not familiar with the finer points), try instructor-style presenting.

Instructor style presenter: Al Gore

4. Coach Style

What it is: Energetic and charismatic speakers gravitate towards this style of presenting. It allows them to connect and engage with their audience using role play and listener interaction.

When to use it: Use this presentation style when you’re speaking at a conference or presenting to an audience who needs to be put at ease. For example, this style would work well if you were speaking to a group of executives who need to be sold on the idea of what your company does rather than the details of how you do it.

Coach style presenter: Linda Edgecombe

5. Storytelling Style

What it is: In this style, the speaker relies on anecdotes and examples to connect with their audience. Stories bring your learning points to life, and the TED’s Commandments never let you down: Let your emotions out and tell your story in an honest way.

When to use it: Avoid this style if you’re in the discovery phase of the sales process. You want to keep the conversation about your prospect instead of circling every point or question back to you or a similar client. This style is great for conference speaking, networking events, and sales presentations where you have adequate time to tell your stories without taking minutes away from questions.

Storytelling style presenter: Jill Bolte Taylor

6. Connector Style

What it is: In this style, presenters connect with their audience by showing how they’re similar to their listeners. Connectors usually enjoy freeform Q&A and use gestures when they speak. They also highly encourage audience reaction and feedback to what they’re saying.

When to use it: Use this style of presenting early in the sales process as you’re learning about your prospect’s pain points, challenges, and goals. This type of speaking sets your listener at ease, elicits feedback on how you’re doing in real time, and is more of a dialogue than a one-sided presentation

Connector style presenter: Connie Dieken

7. Lessig Style

What it is: The Lessig Style was created by Lawrence Lessig , a professor of law and leadership at Harvard Law School. This presentation style requires the presenter to pass through each slide within 15 seconds. When text is used in a slide, it’s typically synchronized with the presenter’s spoken words.

When to use it: This method of presentation is great for large crowds -- and it allows the speaker to use a balance of text and image to convey their message. The rapid pace and rhythm of the slide progression keeps audiences focused, engaged, and less likely to snooze.

Lessig style presenter: Lawrence Lessig

8. Takahashi Style

What it is: This method features large, bold text on minimal slides. It was devised by Masayoshi Takahashi , who found himself creating slides without access to a presentation design tool or PowerPoint. The main word is the focal point of the slide, and phrases, used sparingly, are short and concise.

When to use it: If you find yourself in Takahashi’s shoes -- without presentation design software -- this method is for you. This style works well for short presentations that pack a memorable punch.

Takahashi style presenter: Masayoshi Takahashi

Slides from one of Takahashi’s presentations:

Whether you’re speaking on a conference stage or giving a sales presentation , you can find a method that works best for you and your audience. With the right style, you’ll capture attention, engage listeners, and effectively share your message. You can even ask an  AI presentation maker  tool to create presentations for you in your preferred style

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

• Carmine Gallo

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

• Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation [with Examples]

In this post, we are going to cover the best way, a very simple three-step process that will help you introduce yourself in a presentation. A summary of the steps is below.

• Start with your name and company (or organization or school).
• Tell your audience what problem you can solve for them.
• Share some type of proof (social proof works best) that you can solve this problem.

I will break down each step into a simple-to-follow process. But first… a little background.

First, Identify What Your Audience Wants from Your Presentation

So, before you design your introduction, think about what your audience wants from your presentation. Why do they want to spend their valuable time listening to you? Are going to waste their time? Or, are you going to provide them with something valuable?

For instance, I have expertise in a number of different areas. I’m a public speaking coach, a keynote speaker, a best-selling author, a search engine optimization specialist, and a popular podcaster. However, if I delivered that sentence to any audience, the most likely reaction would be, “So what?” That sentence doesn’t answer any of the above questions. The statement is also really “me-focused” not “audience-focused.”

So, when I start to design my self-introduction, I want to focus just on the area of expertise related to my topic. I’m then going to answer the questions above about that particular topic. Once you have these answers, set them aside for a second. They will be important later.

How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation in Class.

Instead, you probably want to add in a fun way to start a speech . For example, instead of introducing yourself in your class speech and starting in an awkward way, start with a startling statistic. Or start with a summary of your conclusion. Or, you could start the presentation with an inspirational quote.

Each of these presentation starters will help you lower your nervousness and decrease your awkwardness.

If you are delivering a speech in a speech competition or to an audience who doesn’t know you try this technique. Just introduce yourself by saying your name , the school you represent , and your topic . Make it easy. This way you get to your content more quickly and lower your nervousness.

Typically, after you get the first few sentences out of the way, your nervousness will drop dramatically. Since your name, school, and topic should be very easy to remember, this takes the pressure off you during the most nervous moments.

Obviously, follow the guidelines that your teacher or coach gives you. (The competition may have specific ways they want you to introduce yourself.)

How to Introduce Yourself in a Business Presentation — A Step-by-Step Guide.

In a professional setting, when new people walk into a meeting and don’t know what to expect, they will feel uncomfortable. The easiest way to ease some of that tension is to chat with your audience as they come into the room.

By the way, if you are looking for a template for an Elevator Speech , make sure to click this link.

Step #1: Start with your name and company name (or organization).

This one is easy. Just tell your audience your name and the organization that you are representing. If your organization is not a well-known brand name, you might add a short clarifying description. For instance, most people outside of the training industry have never heard of The Leader’s Institute ®. So, my step #1 might sound something like…

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company…

Still short and sweet, but a little more clear to someone who has never heard of my company.

Should you give your job title? Well… Maybe and sometimes. Add your title into the introduction only if your title adds to your credibility.

For example, if you are delivering a financial presentation and you are the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of your company, you might mention that. Your title adds to your credibility. However, if the CFO is delivering a presentation about the value of joining a trade association, the CFO title adds little credibility. So, there is very little value in adding the title.

Step #2: Tell your audience what problem you can solve for them.

For instance, if my topic is how to deliver presentations, I have to determine why the audience would care. What problem will they have that I can help them with? For my audiences, the problem that I most often help people with is how to eliminate public speaking fear. Once I have the problem, I add that to my introduction by using the words, “I help people…”

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people eliminate public speaking fear.

However, if my topic is How to Close a Higher Percentage of Sales Presentations , I’d likely want to alter my introduction a little. I might say something like…

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people design more persuasive sales presentations.

I have expertise in both areas. However, I focus my introduction on just the expertise that is applicable to this audience. If I gave the first introduction to the second audience, they will likely respond by thinking, well, I don’t really get nervous speaking, so I guess I can tune out of this speech .

So, create a problem statement starting with, “I help people…” Make the statement apply to what your audience really wants.

Step #3: Share some type of proof (social proof works best) that you can solve this problem.

By the way, if you just do steps #1 and #2, your introduction will be better than most that you will hear. However, if you add Step #3, you will gain more respect (and attention) from your audience. Without adding some type of proof that you can solve this problem, you are just giving your opinion that you are an expert. However, if you can prove it, you are also proving that you are an expert.

This is the tricky part. For some reason, most people who get to this part feel like they haven’t accomplished great things, so they diminish the great accomplishments that they do have.

For instance, an easy way to offer proof is with a personal story of how you have solved that problem in the past.

A Few Examples of How to Introduce Yourself Before a Presentation.

For instance, one of my early clients was a young accountant. When I was working with him, he came up with the following introduction, “I’m Gary Gorman with Gorman and Associates CPA’s, and I help small businesses avoid IRS audits.” It was a great, audience-focused attention-getter. (No one wants to get audited.) However, as an accountant, it wasn’t like his company was getting a lot of five-star reviews on Yelp! So, he was kind of struggling with his social proof. So, I asked him a series of questions.

Me, “How many clients do you have?”

Gary, “Over 300.”

Me, “How many small business tax returns have you processed?”

Gary, “Well, at least a couple hundred a year for 15 years.”

Me, “So, at least 3000?” He nodded. “How many of your 300 clients have been audited since you have been representing them?”

He looked at me and said, “Well, none.”

So, we just added that piece of proof to his talk of introduction.

I’m Gary Gorman with Gorman and Associates CPA’s, and I help small businesses avoid IRS audits. In fact, in my career, I’ve helped clients complete over 3000 tax returns, and not a single one has ever been audited.

Here Is How I Adjust My Introduction Based on What I Want the Audience to Do.

For my proof, I have a number of options. Just like Gary, I have had a lot of clients who have had great successes. In addition, I have published two best-selling books about public speaking. I also have hundreds of thousands of people who listen to my podcast each week. So, I can pick my evidence based on what I want my audience to do.

For instance, if I’m speaking at a convention, and I want the audience to come by my booth to purchase my books, my introduction might sound like this.

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people eliminate public speaking fear. One of the things that I’m most know for is being the author of two best-selling books, Fearless Presentations and Mastering Presentations.

However, if I’m leading a webinar, I may want the audience to purchase a seat in one of my classes. In that case, my introduction might sound like this.

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people eliminate public speaking fear. For instance, for the last 20 years, I’ve taught public speaking classes to over 20,000 people, and I haven’t had a single person fail to reduce their nervousness significantly in just two days.

If my goal is to get the audience to subscribe to my podcast, my intro might sound like…

Hi, I’m Doug Staneart with The Leader’s Institute ®, an international leadership development company, and I help people eliminate public speaking fear. One of the ways that I do this is with my weekly podcast called, Fearless Presentations, which has over one million downloads, so far.

Use the Form Below to Organize How to Introduce Yourself in a Presentation.

The point is that you want to design your introduction in a way that makes people pause and think, “Really? That sounds pretty good.” You want to avoid introductions that make your audience think, “So what?”

If you have a speech coming up and need a good introduction, complete the form below. We will send you your answers via email!

Can You Replace Your Introduction with a PowerPoint Slide?

Is it okay to make your first slide (or second slide) in your presentation slides an introduction? Sure. A good public speaker will often add an introduction slide with a biography, portrait, and maybe even contact information. I sometimes do this myself.

However, I NEVER read the slide to my audience. I often just have it showing while I deliver the short introduction using the guide above. This is a great way to share more of your work experience without sounding like you are bragging.

For tips about how many powerpoint slides to use in a presentation , click here.

Remember that There Is a Big Difference Between Your Introduction in a Presentation and Your Presentation Starter.

When you introduce yourself in a presentation, you will often just use a single sentence to tell the audience who you are. You only use this intro if the audience doesn’t know who you are. Your presentation starter, though, is quite different. Your presentation starter should be a brief introduction with relevant details about what you will cover in your presentation.

For details, see Great Ways to Start a Presentation . In that post, we show ways to get the attention of the audience. We also give examples of how to use an interesting hook, personal stories, and how to use humor to start a presentation.

Podcasts , presentation skills

View More Posts By Category: Free Public Speaking Tips | leadership tips | Online Courses | Past Fearless Presentations ® Classes | Podcasts | presentation skills | Uncategorized

11 Interactive Presentation Games to Win Easy Engagement in 2024

Lawrence Haywood • 08 Apr 2024 • 10 min read

So, how to make a presentation engaging? Audience attention is a slippery snake. It’s difficult to grasp and even less easy to hold, yet you need it for a successful presentation.

No Death by PowerPoint, no to drawing monologues; it’s time to bring out the interactive presentation games !

Bonus : Free game presentation templates to use. Scroll down for more👇

These 11 games below are perfect for an interactive presentation . They’ll score you mega-plus points with colleagues, students, or wherever else you need a kick of super-engaging interactivity… So let’s check out those exciting presentation formats!

Table of Contents

• #1: Live Quiz

#2: What Would You Do?

#3: key number, #4: guess the order, #5: 2 truths, 1 lie, #6: 4 corners, #7: obscure word cloud, #8: heart, gun, bomb.

• #9: Match Up

#10: Spin the Wheel

#11: q&a balloons, interactive powerpoint presentation games – yes or no, frequently asked questions.

Host Interactive Presentation Games for Free!

Add interactive elements that make the crowd go wild . Make your whole event memorable for any audience, anywhere, with AhaSlides.

More Interactive Presentation Tips with AhaSlides

• The Complete Guide to Make a Presentation Interactive
• Interactive Presentation Ideas to Enliven Work/Hangout
• Interactive Presentation Techniques

Start in seconds.

Get free templates for your next interactive presentation. Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!

#1: Live Quiz Competition

Is there any event that hasn’t been immediately improved with some trivia?

A live quiz is an evergreen, ever-engaging way to consolidate your presentation’s info and check the understanding of it all amongst your audience. Expect big laughs as your audience competes fiercely over who was listening to your presentation the most complex.

Here’s how to play:

• Set up your questions on AhaSlides – the free quizzing software .
• Present your quiz to your players, who join by typing your unique code into their phones.
• Take your players through each question, and they race to get the correct answer the fastest.
• Check the final leaderboard to reveal the winner!

Learn how to set up your presentation quiz for free in just a few minutes! 👇

Put your audience in your shoes. Give them a scenario related to your presentation and see how they would deal with it.

Let’s say you’re a teacher giving a presentation on dinosaurs. After presenting your info, you would ask something like…

A stegosaurus is chasing you, ready to snap you up for dinner. How do you escape?

After each person submits their answer, you can take a vote to see which is the crowd’s favourite response to the scenario.

This is one of the best presentation games for students as it gets young minds whirring creatively. But it also works great in a work setting and can have a similar freeing effect, which is especially significant as a large group icebreaker .

• Create a brainstorming slide and write your scenario at the top.
• Participants join your presentation on their phones and type their responses to your scenario.
• Afterwards, each participant votes for their favourite (or top 3 favourites) answers.
• The participant with the most votes is revealed as the winner!

No matter the topic of your presentation, there’s sure to be a lot of numbers and figures flying around.

As an audience member, keeping track of them isn’t always easy, but one of the interactive presentation games that makes it easier is Key Number .

Here, you offer a simple prompt of a number, and the audience responds with what they think it refers to. For example, if you write ‘ $25′ , your audience might respond with ‘our cost per acquisition’ , ‘our daily budget for TikTok advertising’ or ‘the amount John spends on jelly tots every day’ .

• Create a few multiple-choice slides (or open-ended slides to make it more complicated).
• Write your key number at the top of each slide.
• Write the answer options.
• Participants join your presentation on their phones.
• Participants select the answer they think the critical number relates to (or type in their answer if open-ended).

If keeping track of numbers and figures is challenging, it can be even tougher to follow entire processes or workflows explained in a presentation.

To cement this information in your audience’s mind, Guess the Order is a fantastic minigame for presentations.

You write the steps of a process, jumble them up, and then see who can put them in the right order the fastest.

• Create a ‘Correct Order’ slide and write your statements.
• Statements are automatically jumbled up.
• Players join your presentation on their phones.
• Players race to put the statements in the correct order.

You might have heard of this one as a great icebreaker, but it’s also one of the top presentation games for checking who’s paying attention.

And it’s pretty simple to do. Just think of two statements using the information in your presentation, and make another one up. Players have to guess which is the one you’ve made up.

This one is a great re-capping game and works for students and colleagues.

• Create a list of 2 truths and one lie covering different topics in your presentation.
• Read out two truths and one lie and get participants to guess the lie.
• Participants vote for the lie either by hand or through a multiple-choice slide in your presentation.

The best presentations are ones that spark a bit of creative thinking and discussion. There’s no better presentation game for evoking this than 4 Corners.

The concept is simple. Present a statement based on something from your presentation that’s open to different points of view. Depending on each player’s opinion, they move to a corner of the room labelled ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ .

Maybe something like this:

An individual is shaped more by nature than nurture.

Once everyone is in their corner, you could have a structured debate between the four sides to bring different opinions to the table.

• Set up the ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ and ‘strongly disagree’ corners of your room (if running a virtual presentation, then a simple show of hands could work).
• Write some statements which are open to different opinions.
• Read out the statement.
• Each player stands in the right corner of the room, depending on their view.
• Discuss the four different viewpoints.

Live word clouds are always a beautiful addition to any interactive presentation. If you want our advice, include them whenever you can – presentation games or not.

If you do plan to use one for a game in your presentation, a great one to try is Obscure Word Cloud .

It works on the same concept as the popular UK game show Pointless . Your players are given a statement and have to name the most obscure answer they can. The least-mentioned correct answer is the winner!

Take this example statement:

Name one of our top 10 countries for customer satisfaction.

The most popular answers may be India, USA and Brazil , but the points go to the least mentioned correct country.

• Create a word cloud slide with your statement at the top.
• Players submit the most obscure answer they can think of.
• The most obscure one appears most diminutive on the board. Whoever submitted that answer is the winner!

Word Clouds for Every Presentation

Get these word cloud templates when you sign up for free with AhaSlides!

For Ice Breaking

For Testing

This one’s a great game to use in the classroom, but if you’re not looking for presentation games for students, it also works wonders in a casual work setting.

Heart, Gun, Bomb is a game in which teams take turns to answer questions presented in a grid. If they get an answer right, they either get a heart, a gun or a bomb…

• A ❤️ grants the team an extra life.
• A 🔫 takes away one life from any other team.
• A 💣 takes away one heart from the team who got it.

All teams start with five hearts. The team with the most hearts at the end, or the only surviving team, is the winner!

• Before starting, create a grid table for yourself with either a heart, gun or bomb occupying each grid (on a 5×5 grid, this should be 12 hearts, nine guns and four bombs).
• Present another grid table to your players (5×5 for two teams, 6×6 for three groups, etc.)
• Write a figure stat (like 25%) from your presentation into each grid.
• Split players into the desired number of teams.
• Team 1 chooses a grid and says the meaning behind the number ( for example, the number of customers last quarter ).
• If they’re wrong, they lose a heart. If they’re right, they get either a seat, gun or bomb, depending on what the grid corresponds to on your grid table.
• Repeat this with all the teams until there’s a winner!

👉 Get more interactive presentation ideas (interactive PowerPoint ideas) with AhaSlides.

#9: Match Up – Interactive Presentation Games

Here’s another quiz-type question that can be a great addition to your roster of presentation games.

It involves a set of prompt statements and a set of answers. Each group is jumbled; the players must match the information with the correct answer as quickly as possible.

Again, this one works well when the answers are numbers and figures.

• Create a ‘Match Pairs’ question.
• Fill out the set of prompts and answers, which will automatically shuffle.
• Players match each prompt with its answer as fast as possible to score the most points.

If there’s a more versatile presentation game tool than the humble spinner wheel , we aren’t aware of it.

Adding the random factor of a spinner wheel might be just what you need to keep engagement in your presentation high. There are presentation games you can use with this, including…

• Choosing a random participant to answer a question.
• Choosing a bonus prize after getting an answer correct.
• Choosing the next person to ask a Q&A question or give a presentation.
• Create a spinner wheel slide and write the title at the top.
• Write the entries for the spinner wheel.
• Spin the wheel and see where it lands!

Tip 💡 You can choose the AhaSlides spinner wheel to use your participants’ names, so you don’t have to fill in the entries manually! Learn more interactive presentation techniques with AhaSlides.

This one’s a great way to turn a regular end-of-presentation feature into a fun, engaging game.

It’s got all the hallmarks of a standard Q&A, but this time, all the questions are written on balloons.

It’s a super simple one to set up and play, but you’ll see how motivated participants are to ask questions when it involves balloons!

• Hand out a deflated balloon and a Sharpie to each participant.
• Each participant blows up the balloon and writes their question on it.
• Each participant bats their balloon to where the speaker is standing.
• The speaker answers the question and then pops or throws away the balloon.

🎉 Tips: Best Q&A Apps to Engage With Your Audience | 5+ Platforms For Free in 2024

So, how do you feel about AhaSlides’s creative ideas for presentations? Being by far the most popular presentation tool on the planet, you may want to know if there are any presentation games to play on PowerPoint.

Unfortunately, the answer is no. PowerPoint takes presentations incredibly seriously and doesn’t have a lot of time for interactivity or fun of any kind.

But there’s good news…

It is possible to directly embed presentation games into PowerPoint presentations with free help from AhaSlides.

You can import your PowerPoint presentation to AhaSlides with the click of a button and vice versa , then place interactive presentation games like the ones above directly between your presentation slides.

💡 PowerPoint presentation games in less than 5 minutes ? Check the video below or our quick tutorial here to find out how!

What are the benefits of playing interactive presentation games?

⁤Interactive presentation games boost engagement, participation and knowledge retention. ⁤⁤They turn passive listeners into active learners by incorporating elements like live polls , idea board , quizzes, word clouds and Q&A .

How do you make a presentation interactive with games?

– Match your content: The game should reinforce the topics being covered, not just be random entertainment. – Audience considerations: Age, group size, and their knowledge level will inform game complexity. – Tech tools & time: Consider tools like AhaSlides, Mentimeter Alternatives , Kahoot , etc., or design simple no-tech games based on the time you have. – Utilise appropriate questions, including icebreaker games questions or general knowledge quiz questions

How can I make my presentation more engaging?

Making presentations more engaging can be a challenge, but there are several techniques you can use to make your presentation more interesting and memorable, including (1) start with a strong opening (2) use lots of visual ads and (3) tell attractive story. Also, remember to keep it short and sweet, and of course, practice a lots!

Lawrence Haywood

Former ESL teacher and quiz master converted to the wild slide. Now a content creator, traveller, musician and big time slider preaching the good word of interactivity.

More from AhaSlides

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Home > Resources > Group presentation rubric

Group presentation rubric

This is a grading rubric an instructor uses to assess students’ work on this type of assignment. It is a sample rubric that needs to be edited to reflect the specifics of a particular assignment. Students can self-assess using the rubric as a checklist before submitting their assignment.

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Roblox The Presentation Experience Codes

Get your note cards ready, it's time to present! Hop into a virtual classroom inside of The Presentation Experience and be whatever kind of student you want! Are you the class clown? The attentive listener? The sleeper? The one who reminds the teacher that there's homework? The choice is yours! Interact with your peers by spending points to cheer them on while they present, or throw them off with various sounds and physical interruptions! So how do you get points quickly? With codes of course!

All of the codes below can be used to redeem a certain amount of points, or even a special point boost if you're lucky! If you're looking for even more freebies, be sure to check back with this article regularly—we update this list as soon as new codes come out! If you find a code in the  Working Codes  section that seems expired, please let us know so we can remove it as soon as possible. Keep in mind, also, that you'll need to enter each code exactly as it's written or the experience won't accept it!

If you're looking for more Roblox content to browse while you wait for new codes, check out some of our best of articles including 5 best Roblox games like Call of Duty , 5 best Roblox games like Pokémon , or Best Roblox games like The Sims !

All The Presentation Experience Codes List

The presentation experience codes (working).

• scaryhalloween2023 —Redeem for 60 Points and 15 Gems (New)
• spookpoints —Redeem for 100 Points (New)
• summerboost —Redeem for a 5x Point Boost for 10 min (New)
• OMG350KLIKES —Redeem for 50 Points
• unexpected —Redeem for 15 Gems
• UGC —Redeem for 30 Gems
• coffee —Redeem for 60 Points
• maxwellgood —Redeem for 20 Gems
• manfacepooper —Redeem for a 5x Point Boost for 10 min
• fartyreward —Redeem for 100 Points
• minimalgamespro —Redeem for 25 Points
• UwU —Redeem for 20 Gems
• Hallway —Redeem for 10 Gems
• pencil —Redeem for 100 Points
• 100MVISITS —Redeem for 15 Gems
• MILLIONMEMBERS! —Redeem for 10 Gems and 10 minutes of 5x XP
• therearenootherteachersintheschoolbecausenobodywantstoseethebadteacher —Redeem for 10 Gems
• nootnoot —Redeem for 75 Points
• Megaboost —Redeem for 5x Points for mone minute
• 5gems —Redeem for 5 Gems
• toilet —Redeem for 50 points
• itsaboutdriveitsaboutpower —Redeem for 150 Points
• poop - Redeem for 100 Points
• NikkoCoder - Redeem for 50 Points
• bookworm - Redeem for 80 Points
• code - Redeem for 15 Points
• RAT - Redeem for 25 Points
• Teachermadcuzbad - Redeem for 200 Points

The Presentation Experience Codes (Expired)

These The Presentation Experience codes no longer work.

• 200MVISITS! —Redeem for 100 Points
• CHRISTMASGIFT —Redeem for 39 Gems
• anfisanova —Redeem for 25 Points
• bababooeypoints —Redeem for 50 Points
• 180klikes —Redeem for 10 Gems
• Easter —Redeem for 8 Gems
• 700kmembers —Redeem for 10 Gems and a 1 minute 5x Points Boost
• 600kmembers —Redeem for 5 minutes of 2x Boost
• 175klikes —Redeem for 10 Gems and 5x Point Boost
• beatbox - Redeem for 30 Points
• sus - Redeem for 30 Points

How to Redeem The Presentation Experience Codes

It's easy to redeem codes for free rewards in The Presentation Experience ! To do so, simply follow the steps below.

• First, launch the experience
• Once inside, look for the Gear in the top left corner and click on it .
• Then, select the Twitter bird icon labeled Codes.
• Type or copy and paste a code into the new window that appears.
• Press confirm to receive your free reward!

How do I get more The Presentation Experience codes?

Codes for The Presentation Experience are typically released each time that the experience hits a new like milestone. To stay up to date on these codes, be sure to check back with this article often, join the Minimal Community Discord server, and join the Minimal Games Roblox group . Players who join the Roblox group will also receive a bonus 500 points and 10 Gems!

Why aren't my codes working?

Not all Roblox codes are active for the same amount of time, meaning some expire exceptionally quickly and may even become inactive after 24 hours or less! If you attempt to enter a code and it says  Code Expired , that code is no longer active and, unfortunately, can no longer be redeemed. There's nothing that you can do to fix this issue, the code is simply unobtainable. If you attempt to type in a code and it says  Invalid Code , however, this means that you've likely mistyped the code or neglected to use the correct capitalization. If this happens, try to retype and re-enter the code once more, being sure to copy it exactly as it's written!

What is The Presentation Experience?

The Presentation Experience is a school-based role play experience that allows players to take turns presenting randomly selected topics that are either created by the AI teacher or other players/students in the classroom. Once the teacher calls on you to present, you better be ready—you only have a few minutes to make a great impression! During presentations, other students can clap, scream, jump out of their seat, sleep, burp, and more to interrupt or cheer on their peers. The teacher will do her best to control the class, but it's only a matter of time before things get out of hand!

If you're looking for codes for other games, we have a ton of them in our Roblox Game Codes post! You can also get a bunch of free stuff via our Roblox Promo Codes page.

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For Earth Day, Try These Green Classroom Activities (Downloadable)

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Earth Day is April 22 in the United States and the day the spring equinox occurs in some parts of the world. It’s a day to reflect on the work being done to raise awareness of climate change and the need to protect natural resources for future generations. Protecting the earth can feel like an enormous, distant undertaking to young people. To help them understand that they can play a role by focusing on their backyards or school yards, educators can scale those feelings of enormity to manageable activities that make a difference.

We collected simple ideas for teachers and students to educate, empower, and build a connection with nature so that they may be inspired to respect it and protect it. Classrooms can be the perfect greenhouse to grow future stewards of the environment.

Click to Download the Activities

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Registered sex offender tried to kidnap child from Colorado elementary school, police say

by KRISTINA WATROBSKI | Crisis in the Classroom

AURORA, Colo. (CITC) — A registered sex offender was arrested in Colorado Friday after attempting to kidnap an elementary school student on school property, police say.

33-year-old Solomon Galligan was arrested after walking up to multiple children at Black Forest Hills Elementary School, according to the Aurora Police Department. Authorities say Galligan attempted to grab a young boy and fled school grounds before officers arrived.

It is not immediately clear what prompted Galligan to leave the school's property. He was later caught by police and charged with one count of attempted kidnapping, with his next court appearance set for Thursday.

In an email to families, the Cherry Creek School District said it increased security and police presence at Black Forest Hills Elementary School during dismissal Friday, according to 9News .

“We take all safety concerns very seriously and have launched an investigation into the incident that happened Friday," a spokesperson for the district told Crisis in the Classroom (CITC). "We are committed to being transparent and accountable to our community, and the school is in communication with families.”

READ MORE | Chicago school dean forced student to get abortions after impregnating her, lawsuit says

In October, an Oklahoma police department arrested a registered sex offender who was discovered hiding inside a Catholic school. Staff at St. Joseph Catholic School in Enid contacted the Enid Police Department after finding Michael Eugene Steele sleeping underneath a piano. The 44-year-old man was allegedly near a student at the time.

Steele entered the school through an unlocked door, according to the Enid Police Department. He allegedly told the school's principal he was there because people were after him.

“Sex offenders who think they can violate their sex offender registration need to be mindful that they are being watched and will be charged accordingly,” Investigative Services Division Lt. Bryan Hart said at the time.

Have something for the Crisis in the Classroom team to investigate? Call or text the national tip line at 202-417-7273.

A trans teacher asked students about pronouns. Then the education commissioner found out.

New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut criticized a middle school art class slideshow for discussing gender. For the teacher who made the presentation, it was the last straw.

April 22, 2024 | by Sarah Gibson

Kamren Munz knew they wanted to be a teacher from a young age. They grew up in a family of educators. They worked as a substitute for a few years and eventually settled in as a middle school art teacher in Nashua, New Hampshire, one of the largest and most diverse cities in the state. And Munz dove in: They coached the softball team, started a photography club and were named the district's art teacher of the year in 2017.

But what Munz imagined would be a long career in public schools ended a few years ago, when they got caught up in the national battle over how gender, race and politics are discussed in classrooms. First, a few parents complained about Munz’s classroom materials. Then, the most powerful education official in the state, Commissioner Frank Edelblut, seized upon the controversy as a symbol of public schools gone awry — part of a larger battle his department has been waging for years.

This mounting scrutiny from parents and public officials, on top of other problems at the school after the pandemic, became too much for Munz to handle. So they decided to leave the profession they loved. Munz says they’re speaking out now to prevent other teachers from going through something similar.

“It’s not that I was unwilling to teach,” they said. “It was becoming unwell for me to do that. So I really had to think about: What do I need to do to protect my physical being and my mental being?”

A classroom survey sparks controversy

It started with a complaint from a parent.

In September 2021, one of Erin Prowker’s daughters told her about a questionnaire Munz had handed out on the first day of class. It asked what students liked to learn about and how they described themselves. It also asked students for their pronouns — he, she, they, etc.

Prowker said her daughter was “thrown off” by the pronoun questions — and so was she.

“To be honest, I don’t think that gender and pronouns should even be a part of the school situation at all,” said Prowker, who also grew up in Nashua public schools. “I think they’re there to learn and that’s it.”

Asking about pronouns had become a routine in a number of classrooms around the country, as part of an effort to make schools more inclusive of students who identify as transgender or nonbinary. For Munz, acknowledging pronouns was as basic as asking for a student’s name — and a fundamental part of Munz’s own existence. They came out as transgender and nonbinary in 2018, and they were open about their identity at school. Most of the feedback was positive. Some students, Munz says, just shrugged.

“They were like, ‘Cool. You do you. Can you help me with my drawing?’” they recalled, laughing.

But Prowker said it wasn’t just talking about pronouns that bothered her. She was alarmed by a follow-up question that asked whether it was OK to share students’ pronouns with their family.

“Like, are you trying to tell our children to lie to us and to not tell us and keep things from us?” Prowker told NHPR. “It feels like you just think that you guys are more trustworthy than we as parents are, and that gives a really bad taste in my mouth.”

Around the same time, conservative politicians, media and activists across the country were championing a similar concern: that schools were keeping secrets from parents. Over the past few years, and again this session, Republican State House leaders in New Hampshire have pushed legislation to require schools to share a student’s gender identity and pronouns with their family, with or without that student’s consent, and to notify parents about any material related to gender identity. The New Hampshire Supreme Court is also deliberating in a closely watched case over whether a school district should have told a parent when her child started using different pronouns at school.

Nashua wasn’t alone in navigating disagreements about what student activities should require parental notification. The legislature has also waded into this issue. A state law, passed in 2017, prohibits students from being required to fill out a “non-academic survey” without parental consent. At the time, supporters sought to rein in questions from teachers and outside researchers about students’ behavior, race, sexuality and mental health. The education department has since said those rules could also apply to get-to-know-you forms.

Matthew Poska, the principal of Munz’s school, told NHPR the situation was a “perfect storm.” He says a handful of parents raised concerns about the form, but more parents expressed support about the district’s efforts to build rapport with students and be more LGBTQ-friendly. After Prowker first contacted the district, Poska sent out a memo to teachers with a suggested script for discussing pronouns with students, and clear instructions: “Do not require students to fill out a survey regarding their preferences.”

But Munz continued using the questionnaire. Since it wasn’t required, they figured it was within bounds. And it aligned with the other messages the district was sending about being inclusive.

“If your students don’t feel comfortable in class, they’re not going to learn, right?” Munz said.

The form also had more practical benefits, Munz said, that weren’t related to gender. In any given year, they taught around 450 students. Some went by a nickname, rather than the name in school records. Other students rarely came to class, so if Munz knew about their hobbies, Munz tried to incorporate these into a lesson to make school feel more meaningful. 

“There’s no ulterior motive other than to be a good teacher and know who's sitting in front of you,” Munz said.

When Prowker’s other daughter got Munz’s questionnaire later that year, she contacted administrators again. According to a chain of emails obtained by NHPR through a public records request, she demanded a meeting with the teacher and district leaders in April 2022.

Administrators asked Munz to discuss the issue with Prowker.

Munz objected, saying Prowker’s message felt hostile. In an email to supervisors, they also noted that “LGBTQ students are disproportionately discriminated against and harassed at home and school,” and “it is everyone’s duty to our students to make our classrooms as welcoming as possible to ALL.”

The meeting that Prowker requested never happened. As the dispute dragged on, Prowker felt ignored. Munz felt unsupported.

Commissioner’s op-ed amplifies concerns

Later that month, Munz was scrolling on Facebook and stumbled upon an opinion piece by Edelblut. It detailed how teachers were, in his view, undermining family values.

“Parents of students taking an art class should have a reasonable expectation that they will be learning about, well, art,” the piece read. “They should not be concerned, as occurred in another New Hampshire classroom, that the introduction to art will begin with a lesson in pronouns and links to Black Lives Matters for kids and LGBTQ+ for kids.”

The commissioner linked to a 68-page document that he had compiled. It included examples of material that “parents have identified as conflicting with their values.” Names of specific educators were redacted, but Munz immediately recognized several pages from a slideshow they used to introduce themselves to students and families, which included a photo of them. Their face was blacked out, but Munz said it would be easy for anyone associated with the school to recognize them.

“You knew it was a trans art educator with a sleeve tattoo of art supplies in New Hampshire,” they said. “I'm not sure how many of us there were at the time, or are now, but I’m pretty sure not many.”

The slides that Edelblut selected for his op-ed included an explanation of Munz’s pronouns. Another slide said “This teacher believes Black Lives Matter…” and “I support my LGBT students.” The remainder of the 28-page slideshow, which Edelblut didn’t include, focused on how students could succeed in class. It showed former students’ artwork and included a translation for Spanish-speaking families.

In his seven years as commissioner, Edelblut has often used his office to amplify conservative concerns about public schools : investigating allegations from citizens about books, posters and class assignments. And because the Department of Education oversees teacher licensing, Edelblut’s stance on these issues has put teachers on alert, worried their classroom material could end up on his radar.

Edelblut’s April 2022 op-ed, which appeared in the state’s largest newspaper and on the state education department's website, also said that discussing the existence of more than two genders with young children “might conflict with — or worse, undermine — the value system of many of the families.”

Munz was offended by Edelblut’s narrow definition of “values.”

“My question is then, whose family values are you speaking of, right? Because they’re not my family values,” Munz said. “I have students in my classes who are trans, have trans family members, have queer parents, older siblings. So I think the main point is: Public education is public, and that includes everyone.”

Edelblut declined to be interviewed for this story. But in an interview in 2022, he defended the op-ed to NHPR , saying his goal was to offer a window into what was happening in schools.

“I'm just being transparent with actual artifacts from New Hampshire schools,” Edelblut said. “And I think that some of those artifacts run the risk of undermining the effectiveness of all of our educators.”

After this story published, Edelblut defended his actions in an op-ed that was posted on the education department website.

"[W]hen an art teacher, rather than teaching art, introduces children to Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ for Kids, without consulting parents or school leadership. Should we look the other way?"

Emails obtained through a public records request show Prowker’s complaint to Nashua administrators made it to the Department of Education, although it’s not clear who forwarded the complaint; she says it wasn’t her. Another set of parents, who did not respond to NHPR’s requests to talk, flagged Munz’s slideshow directly to Edelblut.

The New Hampshire Department of Education misconduct investigator looked into the complaints against Munz. He never opened a formal investigation. But in the past few years, NEA-New Hampshire, the state’s largest teachers union, says the Department of Education has launched formal misconduct investigations into teachers over similar “non-academic surveys.”

The department did not respond to questions about these investigations, nor any other written questions from NHPR. A spokesman instead provided a brief statement.

“Like all state agencies, the New Hampshire Department of Education often receives concerns from constituents,” the spokesperson wrote. “The Department, including Commissioner Frank Edelblut, takes all constituent concerns seriously and works to respond to their inquiries. We are committed to ensuring the safety of children and work diligently with our partners to address any and all concerns swiftly and with fairness to all involved.”

The final straw

Back when Munz taught at Elm Street Middle School in Nashua, they hung rainbow flags in their classroom, adorned the walls with posters about art and painted murals on the hallway walls. These days, Munz’s office is still filled with colorful decorations and mugs inviting people to ask about their pronouns. But they’re no longer a teacher.

A few months after the commissioner’s op-ed was published, Munz left the profession they loved.

Today, they work in residential life at a local college. They say they’re far happier, but they worry about the LGBTQ students in their old school who have one less adult to stand up for them.

In their resignation letter to Nashua administrators, they described mounting concerns about student behavior in the wake of the pandemic and heightened scrutiny on their gender identity from parents and politicians. And they were frustrated with their administration.

Munz said being a teacher was becoming harder for all sorts of reasons, but looking back, Edelblut’s op-ed was the final straw. They no longer felt safe, or supported, teaching in New Hampshire.

This story was updated on April 22 to include an excerpt of an op-ed by Edelblut that the Department of Education released after this story's publication.

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2024 Identity Management Pop-Up Classroom

Presentations from the event are available ( below the photo album ) for all AAMVA members. If you are not logged in already, you will be prompted to log in. After logging in, files will be accessible. Most files are PDFs of the presentations. Some files are zip folders that contain presentations with companion multimedia files (videos and audio clips). Depending on the size of the file, you may experience a wait before it successfully downloads.

 Presentations

file - 04/18/2024

Physical Card Vulnerabilities and Fraud

Current status of mdl's in north america and mdl implementation lessons learned, how the digital trust service can help drive adoption, relying party outreach engagement and education.

file - 04/17/2024

Relying Party Authentication and Verification of Physical Credentials

What is identity management, identity management: empowering aamva members, how identity is established, fdr and the evolving fraud landscape, evolution of identity administration, current and future physical card design standards and principles.