Digital literacy – Presentations

Hello! Ok, I’ve got something I want to show you today. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while as part of an online course that I’m doing – yes, I too am a distance learner and I’m very proud of this. It’s my presentation on how to be a great presenter. Want to see it? Ok, here it is - tah-dah! I’ve put it online and invited my fellow students to give me feedback. I wonder what they’ll say… Aha, this will be their feedback now… Let’s see what they say. Oh dear. Hmm… now that is not good. Looks like my friends didn’t like my presentation. I need to reflect on this and make it better. To make my presentation better, I am going to add some digital elements to make it more interesting for the viewer. I really want to engage the viewers and get my message across effectively, so I get a good score in my online course. So what can I add? First of all, I’m going to add some images. I can find them by looking for free images online. There are lots of websites that offer free photos, graphics and animations. So let’s go to those websites and download some. Of course, I will get the owner’s permission to use their images and credit all the sources I used. Ok, so let’s download. Great! Now I’m going to work with those images. I can use image editing software for simple tasks. Or I can use image-editing websites to do things like crop, rotate, resize, and save at a reasonable file size. Let’s look at the meaning of those words in an image editing context. ‘Crop’ means removing parts of the image so we focus on a smaller part of the whole. ‘Rotate’ means turning the image around from zero to 360 degrees. ‘Resize’ just means making the image bigger or smaller, according to our needs. I think I’d like to include some video and audio in this presentation. I can film and record some myself on my phone. Or again I can find free resources online. I could also buy some video or audio from the web but I prefer to save money, so I’ll just use the free ones. Ok, I’ve got some great pictures, video and audio, so now I need to put them together in a presentation. I will build my presentation based on good design principles I learned about online: not too much text on the screen; not too many slides; don’t overdo animation and effects; structure the presentation using sections like introduction, main body, conclusion. I’ll use some online tools for this or software I have on my computer, like PowerPoint or Keynote. Just a second… and finish! Right, I have made my new presentation. It looks a lot better than the last one. Let’s see what my fellow students think. Wow! That was fast! Thank you, yeah, thank you, what can I say, it just came over, thank you, thank you very much, thanks. So there it is, you can use digital resources and software to make your presentations stand out from the rest. Give it a go and maybe you can be a presentation hero like me! See you next time!