Presentation and Web 2.0 Project

It was easier said than done. The Presentation project seemed easy enough and fun. When it came time to choose a subject, is when reality set in and I realized this was not going to be a cake-walk.

Preparing the ideas and creating the storyboard was the second obstacle I had to overcome as I have seen these for movies and such, but never paid any attention to them and were turned off by them so for me to face that alone was pretty difficult, luckily there were plenty of resources to gather information about creating a storyboard and I was able to put one together. After the storyboard I had to get down and dirty and start looking for images and other information that I wanted to use in my presentation.

Like I said this project seemed fun and easy from the beginning. It was one of those "Don't judge the book by it's cover moments." I mean, I did have fun creating the presentation, I just wish I had better hardware like a better mic and better software like garageband or something to easily create background music or something. Overall, with what I had to work with, I feel I did a good job, not great, but good.

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I feel that my presentation did flow well and I answered questions to how I would make the changes that I brought up. After watching my presentation a few times, I now feel that my introduction could have been more interesting, something to intrigue the audience or capture their attention. I didn't have any real data to validate any claims, it just seemed more common sense type of stuff that we should do to make these changes at my employer. Also one fellow classmate mentioned that one of my slides was hard to read and after reviewing it, I have to agree somewhat, it was a somewhat cluttered slide, kind of on the edge of being too cluttered I think. But I didn't want to make any changes because any changes to the slide would have made it feel more cluttered and expanding the information into two slides would have been too much. Also I feel that I did flow very well with the presentation, as I rehearsed it many times and had recorded the slide lengths in order to focus on narrating it at the appropriate time.

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Week 5: Muddy With A Chance of Clear-Presentations

Well I titled this week's blog: Muddy With A Chance of Clear-Presentations.
This week's information was about presentations, some of it showed what to do and some of it was about what NOT to do. I have been doing PowerPoint presentations for years now. Many of them were just for fun and some were for school or work. I know now that many of my presentations would be banned, as they broke probably every copyright rule and had so many animations and such, it would leave you dizzy. In time, I did begin to scale my presentations back but after this week's lesson I know it will take a lot of constraint to try to use what I learned in my next presentation.
Which will not be like this:

PowerPoint Created by: Christopher Ondrako, 2012

This little example I just mad for this blog, as I don't have any real examples on this computer. But still many can get the point. And I just learned how to embed the presentation into my blog using Windows Live-SkyDrive. Now back on point, for the most part the information seemed kind of common sense, I saw some crazy examples of what not to do in PowerPoint and other things that opened my eyes to things that I need to fix myself. Such as the animations and such. I too was one of those who thought animation really gets the attention of the viewer.When all it really is, is a distraction.

One thing that I learned, but is still muddy, is the use of infographics. I haven't really seen these types of graphs before this class and think they are very intriguing, though kind of confusing and too cluttered much of the time.

Image Created by: (Latitude Research)  http://www.flickr.com/people/37527143@N03/

Basically, what I took from this week's lesson is, "Less is More." I mean of course the slides shouldn't be blank, but still they shouldn't be cluttered and fill with non-essential items that don't pertain to the presentation. Important "Do's" are to Format and Style the presentation to make it appealing. Use a clear and professional font type, and use colors and themes that gel very nicely with the message being projected from the presentation.

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