Me and Steve Jobs: How to Deliver a Great Presentation

I’ve been invited to talk about social media in education at the annual NHWHEL Spring Conference in April. It’s very exciting because I have so many recent examples not only from Keene State College, but from K-16 across the country. My plan is to share examples of how students, when encouraged to use technology that they’ve been brought up with and, with the guidance of a phenomenal teacher, how their work can have a positive impact on their community and how these tools empower them to direct their own learning. It will be hard to distill in 45 minutes all of this for an audience who might view the term social media as that dangerous Facebooky stuff.

My concern isn’t about the content; I know it and love talking about it. It’s the presentation style that I want to take time to focus on. The problem with so many presentations is that presenters stress over the content and begin by working in a linear fashion; “first I talk about a, now I talk about b, and then transition to c”. This, unfortunately, is transferred to the slide deck in a series of mindless bullet points whose purpose is to serve as a reminder to the presenter. It can be pretty, shall we say, dry stuff to have to sit through. I know, I’ve created and delivered it. So how does one move from being adequate to being great?

In my mind the king of the presentation is Steve Jobs; passionate, energetic, knowledgeable, and did I say passionate? It doesn’t hurt that Apple stages his every move, every mouse click, and every image as a Broadway show but there is something in his delivery and style that any adequate-to-great wannabe can take away.

Here, Carmine Gallo, breaks down a Jobs keynote into simple presentation techniques that anyone can adopt. It seems easy but if it truly were then we would see fewer thoughtless slide decks and hear fewer presentations that drone on….and on.

So I’m going to practice the new art of presenting–ask me after my April gig if I’ve improved or not.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 12:37 pm and is filed under information, presentation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.