PRESENTATIONS
Creating the presentation
• Your presentation should take about 10-15 minutes for your classmates to view or review.
o If you are narrating your presentation, using a video, or providing a podcast, this time limit is self-explanatory.
o If you are submitting an unnarrated slide show (PowerPoint or Prezi), provide notes or a transcript to help your viewer understand what they are viewing.
o If you are submitting a paper, keep in mind that one double spaced page takes about 3 minutes to read, so your paper should be about 3-5 double-spaced pages in length.
• If you are doing a PowerPoint presentation, you may want to do a web search on "effective PowerPoint presentations" - there are plenty of sites with great suggestions. My top 5 tips are:
1. Use easy to read fonts and keep them consistent throughout the presentation.
2. Make sure your text is large enough. For standard fonts, a pitch of 28 is usually a good size (with headers being larger).
3. Use bullet points rather than paragraphs and complete sentences, especially if you are providing narration.
4. Visual images that illustrate the point you are trying to make promote deeper learning, but don't go crazy with the clip art! Simpler is usually better.
5. Go easy on the animations. They can be effective, but they shouldn't be distracting.
Remember to provide citations - if you are presenting a fact that you learned from an article, website or other source, you MUST provide a citation. I expect that everyone will be using citations since you all conducted research to learn more about your topics.
o In a slide show, you can provide the citation in small font at the bottom of the slide you are citing or you can provide a separate reference list.
o In a paper, you must use in-text citations and a reference list.
o In an audio presentation, you can verbally acknowledge your source (e.g. "Dr. John Smith from Harvard University said...") and a separate reference list along with your presentation.