How to Do a Presentation – Instructions for Students

Presentations can be a great way to assess student learning.  While facilitating this in an online environment may seem daunting at first, by creating clear expectations for students – along with instructions for managing the “tech” piece – you will be setting your students up for success.  The following “Options” are three ways of asking students to create (and share!) presentations in remote learning environments.  The linked resources and language here are student-facing, so feel free to copy-and-paste into your own assignment prompts – and email us if you need any modifications for your unique context!

Option #1: Create Video of Yourself

This option is most appropriate when the most important thing is that your instructor sees you giving the presentation (and not any visual aids).

Biggest piece of advice: practice before you start and test everything out.

Equipment: Smartphones from the last 5 years actually take pretty high quality video. If you don’t have access to one of your own or can’t borrow one for recording, your camera built into your laptop or tablet will also work.

  • If you use a smartphone, use the back camera (not selfie mode) and shoot in landscape (holding the phone on its side). It helps if someone is holding the phone and recording for you, even better if you can prop it up.
  • Make sure you and everything else you want to viewer to see are in the frame. You might have to stand farther back from the camera than you think. The only way you can tell if you have good framing is if you do a test video.
  • Make sure you have a lot of light. The only way you can tell if you have good lighting is if you do a test video.
  • Make sure we can hear you. The only way you can tell if you have good sound is if you do a test video.
  • The visual aids are less important than your camera presence. If you have to choose between you and the PowerPoint slides being in focus, always choose YOU.
  • Use everything you’ve learned thus far to engage the listener, even though you can’t see them.

Once you’re done with your video, please follow these steps to create a link to the video to share with your professor.

Option #2: Create a Narrated PowerPoint

This option is most appropriate when the most important thing is your content and presentation (and necessarily your physical presence).

 

Biggest piece of advice: practice before you start and test everything out.

Equipment: A computer with PowerPoint installed, a functioning speaker and microphone (most the times, it is built into the computer or laptop).

Best practices for narrated PowerPoint presentations:

  • Start with a script or an solid outline of what you’re going say
  • At beginning, tell viewer the video’s purpose
  • Use signaling to focus the listener’s attention on important information (the use of bold formatting is this sentence is an example)
  • Use segmenting to chunk information to manageable sets of concepts
  • Weed out extraneous information that does not pertain to the purpose of the video

Creating a narrated PowerPoint is a 5 step process:

Option #3: Submit/Share a VoiceThread Assignment

In addition to facilitating threaded discussions using audio and video, VoiceThread’s Assignment tool allows you to easily make space for students to create, submit, and share audio and/or video presentations.  We will provide more detailed tutorials on this in the future (if you’re interested in doing this, email us at moodlehelp@berkshirecc.edu), but in the meantime, the following videos provide a good overview:

How To: Using VoiceThread Assignment Submission (for students)

 

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