Presentation Week - David Truss :: Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts

I have not used PowerPoint very many times in my life. However, I have sat through, and sometimes suffered through, many as part of an audience. So I felt a little intimidated when Nicoletta, one of my Vice Principals in my new school, asked me to create a PowerPoint presentation to introduce the new Graduation Transitions program that I am responsible for implementing. The first presentation would be happening on the first day of school, delivered to almost 80 staff members, most of whom I had not met yet. The next two would be to the Grade 11’s and Grade 12’s respectively in their Assemblies four days later. ‘Great’, I thought, ‘I get to bore the entire staff and half of the school’s students with a PowerPoint presentation in my first week, what a great first impression!’
Fortunately, I have been thinking a lot about good presentations lately. I’ve previously written a short post linking to a great presentation, and I found another valuable resource, a post by Joyce Valenza.
Well, feedback on my presentations has been overwhelmingly good, “The best presentation to staff I’ve seen since coming here,” -this was from a staff member I bumped into in the photocopy room, and “I loved your presentation,” -from a grade 11 student who held a door open for me. I’ve actually been a little uncomfortable with the compliments. The fact is that I am delivering a good message about a bad situation.

A Little History
The original Graduation Portfolio, like Graduation Transitions is a good idea. The problem with the Portfolio was that the Provincial Government implemented it but did not provide sufficient financial or resource support to make it effective and more importantly, meaningful. On the one end of the spectrum, teachers in our district worked very hard to make the Portfolio program work, and just before the final mandatory presentations, the Provincial Government backed down and made Portfolio optional. On the other end of the spectrum our district Student Leadership Council (SLC) initiated a district-wide ‘vote’ that quite intentionally was biased towards getting rid of the Portfolio. I could write several long-winded posts about both perspectives but in the end what really matters is that the Portfolio program is gone now, and any new program is going to be faced with skepticism, doubt and ill feelings from many students and teachers alike! So now the challenge is to make the new, easier (mandatory) program work, rather than throwing our hands in the air and thinking, “When are they going to pull the plug on this one?”
The fact is, I believe Graduation Transitions is here to stay. This program has been weeded down to having every student in the Province show evidence that they have considered important aspects around their health, community/work experience and their careers. I don’t think that these minimum expectations of a BC grad will be going anywhere soon.

About the Presentation
In the end, I think that I did a pretty good job delivering four important messages.
The messages were:
· What does the new program look like
· This is easier than the previous Graduation Portfolio program
· The intent behind the current program is good
· The program may be mandatory, but ‘we’ decide whether to make it a chore or a positive, meaningful experience.

I used a fair bit of comics/humour in the slides, but very little humour in my delivery. I did read a quote off of my slides, but did not really read from my slides beyond that. For the teachers, I used a couple comics at the end to make the point that we can make this much better for the students if we buy into it, and make the most of it. And for the students, I used a series of images to represent the fact that Grad Transitions is the new and much improved version of the Graduation Portfolio that they did not want or like. This was a great slide that was used very early on in my presentation, (the second slide). I wish I could show it here, but I used a few copyrighted images, and although I did not have an issue using them in my presentation, I would not feel comfortable printing them here on a personal blog, without permission. The slide went like this:
An image of an old black & white boxy picture-tube TV with the title “Graduation Portfolio” then an image of a modern flat screen TV with the title “Grad Transitions”. This continued with three more images to impress the point.

Graduation Portfolio	Grad Transition
The Flintstones	Anime Robots
A wall-to-wall 1950’s computer	A sleek new Emac
A tape cassette Sony Walkman	An ipod nano

I used some simple slide or fade transitions between images. I spoke about the history and challenges of the portfolio program while this slide played, but it was powerful enough that I think I should have let it play in silence, or had some cheesy video game music behind it, (perhaps Space Invaders for Graduation Portfolio and some ambient music from Warcraft for Grad Transitions). The chuckles in the audience told me that the message was getting through.
One of my final slides went back to this theme. It was a split screen with a comic on the left, titled ‘Graduation Portfolio’ that had a juggler with his juggling balls going everywhere, bouncing on the floor, etc. Then on the right hand side, titled ‘Graduation Transition’ I had an oversimplified gif animation file of a line-drawn juggler juggling 3 balls continuously. I confirmed that, ‘Yes, this new program is easier to manage’, but it is still important and something you do have to focus on, and fit into your schedule in order to graduate.’

Both of my presentations, to the staff and to the students ended with this quote: (I did not read it, just had it up as I concluded.)

Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don’t count on harvesting Golden Delicious.
~Bill Meyer

These presentations took a very long time to prepare: Partly because I have not spent a long time using Powerpoint; Partly because the content was so new to me, and because the program is so new that there is little direction yet; Partly because I knew how important this first impression would be. Now despite the fact that the presentations went well, I am not pretending that some, if not many of my audience did not buy into this. The presentation means nothing if I can’t implement this program in a way that students feel is meaningful. Teachers will also buy in if they see that students find this a worthy experience. I have a lot to do to make this work!

Final Thoughts
In conclusion, I am very happy that my ‘Presentation Week’ is over! I learned a lot about creating presentations and again I highly recommend that you read Joyce Valenza’s post and follow some of the links she suggests. Also, I am still grappling with copyright issues. The fact is, I am not going to get permission to use an image of the Flintstones in my presentation… that permission would come too late anyway. But, this was not a presentation made to hand-in to anyone. It created no capital gains for me, and did not have my name attached to it. I did not publish it here on my blog. Is it ok to use copyrighted images for such a presentation?
– – – – –

Image: ‘finally’ by thebigdurian on Flickr.

Originally posted: September 10th, 2007

Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting:

Tomorrow my Principal, Andrew, and I (along with some more staff) are speaking to the parents of next year’s Grade 5’s. I’m using a ready-made slide show but I have put comics at the start and the end as lead-ins to the things I think are important… and… I also spent over an hour taking out all the cheesy-spin-around-flying-words-and transitions.

If I’ve learned just one thing from preparing and doing these presentatons it is that:

DESIGN MATTERS!