presentation

This week, you will prepare your written argument for oral delivery. Imagine you have submitted a proposal in written form, and your audience asks you to deliver an oral presentation to a virtual or asynchronous audience. How would you need to adapt your content to fit within the time constraints or to make it more visually appealing?

Read this week's lesson page for detailed guidance on developing and organizing presentations. The following are your specific assignment expectations and recommendations.

Provide a recorded narration of about 7 minutes.

· The narration delivers your message. Do not skip this. Slides without narration have little value.

· Speak your message with energy, enthusiasm, and confidence. You are the expert with something valuable to share!

· Include specific evidence and other researched source information so support your message.

· Do not read your slides. Use the slides as an outline to support your complete spoken message.

· Do not read your essay. Adapt your essay's message to be more suitable for spoken and visual delivery.

· Recording is most easily done using the narration tools in PowerPoint, though you may submit audio in any .mp3 or .mp4 format.

· Webcam video recording is optional, but consider how being visible to your audience may enhance your presentation's effectiveness.

Use PowerPoint or a similar program as your visual aid.

· Organize textual content into very concise, clear slide titles and bullets. Your narration carries the message. The words on the slides only provide an outline of ideas, important details, and citations.

· Support your message with useful and relevant graphs, charts, and images. Explain them in your narration if necessary.

· Maintain consistent font size and style, and design slides for a visually appealing audience experience.

The following is a sample organizational structure.

· First Slide: Title, your name, topic, course, and date

· Second Slide: Introduction—In the introduction, you might discuss why you chose your topic and why it is important. Provide a clear thesis statement.

· Third and Fourth Slides: Problem Analysis—What is causing the problem? Is it getting worse? What will happen if we fail to act?

· Fifth and Sixth Slides: Solutions—Discuss a range of possible solutions. Select the best one and convince your audience it is the best choice.

· Seventh Slide: Conclusion—Provide a recap of your argument, and make a final call to action.

· Eighth Slide: References—Review the information in the following section for additional guidance.

Follow APA citation guidelines for ethical source use.

· In your narration, mention important sources to strengthen your credibility.

· On your slides, write parenthetical citations for all written information and visual elements.

· On a references slide, list full APA source citations for all sources used in the presentation.

Before submitting your narrated presentation, use the following rubric as a self-evaluation checklist. Be sure your narration is included with your visual aid.

Welcome to Week 8!

From the classroom to the boardroom, this course has helped you develop important written and communication skills that will serve you in any career setting. Over the last 7 weeks, you have worked hard to develop critical thinking and information literacy skills that have made you a stronger writer and a better communicator.

You have recognized and explored problems affecting those in your community. That led to research to understand the situation and practical options for resolution. Ultimately, you produced an essay recommending a course of action to benefit that community. Your final step will be to adapt your message from written to audio-visual form, a task you will often encounter in life.

As our session wraps up, recognize how the researching and writing process have prepared you well for the kind of communication you will encounter as you move toward your goals and dreams. Even as you walk across the stage at graduation, remember your work here fondly as you use writing to evaluate, review, argue, learn, set goals, and achieve them. Let's spend some time this week reflecting on all you have learned this session and thinking about how these skills will serve you in your careers.

Goals:

· Practice valuable skills for effective communication and active citizenship.

· Develop spoken and visual communication skills for effective presentations.

· Consider the role of communication and critical thinking in relation to your career goals.

What will you learn?

 

This week, you will concentrate on critical thinking, cultural competence, information literacy, communication, and global awareness. You will learn the following.

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Critical Thinking: Evaluate complex arguments.

Think critically about arguments and how they are made.

Skills You Learn:

· Learn strategies for organizing ideas and arguments.

· Formulate a persuasive position on a topic.

· Consider opposing arguments.

Cultural Competence: Engage with diverse points of view to develop ethical decision making and communication skills.

Explore diverse issues in diverse communities.

Skills You Learn:

· Understand and engage with diverse perspectives on an issue.

· Review and critically evaluate your own writing and the writing of others.

· Work effectively in peer groups.

Information Literacy: Develop research techniques.

Develop skills for academic and industry research.

Skills You Learn:

· Interpret and organize data.

· Develop structured research questions.

· Apply research to complex problem solving.

Communication: Refine skills in oral, written, and visual communication to reach diverse audiences.

Gain communication tools for your career.

Skills You Learn:

· Communicate research findings clearly and ethically.

· Present an argument through multiple modalities.

· Utilize persuasive writing techniques.

Global Awareness: Examine various social and cultural climates to develop thoughtful and appropriate communications.

Understand the space and debates of global culture.

Skills You Learn:

· Understand conventions of written and oral communication in various contexts.

· Use the audience to help develop appropriate arguments and communications.

· Evaluate the importance of communication in the workplace.

Professionalism in Communication

This week, we will think of communication skills within the context of professional communication or communication skills that are most used in the workplace. We will also consider how we need professionalism in nonworkplace communications.

Whether written, spoken, or purely visual in nature, all communication is based on a symbolic code that both the sender and audience must understand and use effectively. Creative communicators may sometimes bend the rules, but most of our communication must meet certain expectations to efficiently and effectively convey our messages.

As you consider how to communicate effectively with others, always remember the following five Cs.

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Clear

Every symbolic element of the communication must be easily and correctly interpreted. You don't want your audience to work too hard or get confused.

Concise

The communication must deliver the message in as little time and space as possible. Inefficient messages may cause audiences to lose interest, get distracted, be overwhelmed, or simply run out of time to take in the message.

Complete

The message must be adequately detailed. Communicators must balance conciseness with completeness because missing information prevents the message from effectively getting the job done.

Correct

Like the rules of the road every new driver studies, communication has rules for word use, punctuation, sentence structure, and more. Errors cause problems for our audiences just as a missing stop sign could lead to traffic accidents.

Collaborative

Communication exists between people and requires each to respect and understand the other so they can cooperatively work toward shared goals and values. Each must engage constructively for their individual and shared benefit.

Making Career Connections

As you think about how what you have learned in this class relates to your career, it helps to first consider your career goals. Most students tend to fall into one of the following three categories when it comes to their careers.

1. Career starters: These are traditional college students with little relevant work experience related to their chosen career path.

2. Career advancers: These individuals are already working in their field and wish to move up to a position of greater responsibility.

3. Career changers: They are looking to pursue a different path in life, often after a long career in one field.

In this week's discussion, consider how the writing, research, and presentation skills you have honed in this class are related to your personal career aspirations.

Presenting Oral and Visual Communications

Not surprisingly, because this is an English course, we have focused on written messages. However, much of modern communication relies on oral and visual delivery, and what we share in writing must also be presented in other ways. It's important to see how the same message can be delivered in a presentation using spoken and visual communication skills.

Why visual? We all know that people tend to understand better when they can see something than when they simply read or hear it, so presentations generally supplement the spoken word with visual elements, like charts, graphs, and images.

Take a moment to review this photo.

Instead of this picture, we could use a written description, such as "Presentation skills are very important. In order to make an effective presentation, you should dress professionally, speak confidently, use positive body language, and create a visually appealing slide deck."

This photo tells us this information without the need to put it in words. This is just a simple example of how we can use visual elements in a presentation to make our slides less wordy.

Finally, this brief table shows the key differences between an essay and a presentation in a visually appealing manner.

	Essay	Presentation
Appearance	Paragraphs	Minimal text plus visual elements
Delivery	Written message	Spoken message
Audience role	Reading	Listening and watching

Assignment Connection Part I: Creating Engaging Presentation Slides

There are many presentation software programs, including Prezi, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides, but the majority of organizations rely on PowerPoint. If you wish to use something other than PowerPoint, please check with your instructor first.

Regardless of which software is used, presenters must remember that the visual aid is exactly that: an aid to visually support and enhance the spoken message. Effective presentations can provide powerful, engaging messages. The best follow the five Cs mentioned earlier.

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Clear

The slides are easy to understand.

· Professional template without distracting graphics

· Large, easy-to-read fonts and high contrast colors

· Consistent pattern of fonts, colors, and organization

· Only essential text

· Uncomplicated graphs and relevant images

Concise and Complete

The slides outline the spoken message.

· Slide titles highlight major points.

· Researched evidence becomes keywords, facts, or statistics (or graphics).

· Short phrases replace complete sentences.

· No more than five bullets and one visual are used on each slide.

Correct

The slides are carefully polished and professional.

· Spelling and punctuation are flawless.

· Visual elements are clear and sufficiently large.

· Citations acknowledge all textual and visual sources.

Collaborative

The visual aid/slides engage while capturing essential content.

· The content supports audience understanding and memory.

· Images and graphics enhance the spoken message.

· Text and citations capture content for later reference.

Developing effective presentations is challenging, but the best way to improve is through regular practice.

Assignment Connection, Part II: Making the Recording

For this presentation, you  must record narration. Without your spoken words, PowerPoint slides are useless.

Recording yourself with a webcam video is not required, but it will make your presentation more engaging because you can make virtual eye contact and use appropriate gestures.

If you haven't developed a narrated PowerPoint before, help is readily available. Here is a great resource: 

Recording Audio in PowerPoint (Microsoft)Links to an external site.

Remember that all sourced content must be cited, even if you remake it into your own words or visual elements. This helpful video will show you how.

Using and Citing Visual Elements in Essays and PowerPointsLinks to an external site.