Time to Talk Tech!

“Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have you given the same presentation 20 times and are looking for a way to “spice up” your presentation. Look no further than at technology that is available to you right now!

Breathe new life into you presentations by polling your audience, using smart glasses, and embedding videos in your slides.

Polling Your Audience

As a speaker, you should always try to engage with your audience in various ways. You ask them questions. You have them ask questions of you. You pass around a “show and tell” object relevant to your topic. Have you ever thought of polling your audience during your presentation.

What is the one thing you see in everybody’s hands nowadays? Right! They have their smart phone in their hands. Why not poll your audience through their smart phones during your presentation? There are services available to you right now to allow you to do this. Here is how it works.

You set up a set of questions on line on one of the polling services. Then, during your presentation, you ask your audience to go to a certain web site to answer your questions. The polling service instantly calculates statistics from your audience’s answers they input through their own smart phone. Then you display the answers on the screen in real time and then draw conclusions, on the spot, from your audience’s answers to the poll questions. What could be easier?

Google on “polling your audience” to discover the latest polling services.

Polling is great, but have you ever had the urge to look back at your slides and away from your audience?

Smart Glasses

We have all had the urge when we are presenting to look behind us at our slides to determine if we are on the correct slide, to remember a point from the slide, or just as a matter of habit. What if I said you could still see your slides without ever turning around again. Enter smart glasses.

What if there could be a device that could display your presentations so you would be able to see them as you are facing your audience. This technology is currently commercially available. Military pilots have been using this technology (heads-up display) for decades.

Smart glasses project your slides and anything else on the master computer screen on a set of glasses you can wear during your presentation.

Google on “smart glasses” to discover the latest smart glasses.

Polling is a crowd pleaser and smart glasses will give you the feeling of presenting on the command deck of the Starship Enterprise, but what can you do to keep your audience from getting bored? Enter embedded videos in your presentation.

Embedded Videos in Your Presentation

Your audience will get bored easily if you don’t vary your presentation method (e.g., briefing a slide, audience exercises, polling using your audience members, etc).

One of the great ways to vary your presentation method is to show short videos relevant to your topic. Emphasis on the word “short” – one to two minutes. Remember the videos must support your presentation and not take it over. Longer videos have a tendency to do this.

I gave a presentation a few weeks ago and embedded some YouTube videos. They were a hit! 99% of the time, you would not want to use the complete YouTube video. You just want to use a part of the video. No problem. There is a way to start and end YouTube videos for whatever part you want. Just Google on “embedding YouTube videos in a Powerpoint” to find out how to do this. It’s easy. Trust me.

So, today, you learned about three ways to use technology to enhance your presentations: polling your audience, using smart glasses to see your presentation while you are still facing your audience, and embedding videos in your presentation.

Try all three of these and you will may feel like Captain Kirk giving orders on the command deck of the Starship Enterprise!

Call to Action

• Use polling in your next presentation
• Investigate the state-of-the-art smart glasses. Consider using them in your next presentation
• Use at least one relevant video clip in your next presentation.

“If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.“ – Seth Godin