Serendipity35

Slideshare recently ran a contest for the World's Best Presentation.

There were some categories like "PowerPoint Deck as Leave Behind" and "In-Person Presentation Support" and combinations thereof.

Due to contest law issues, they only accepted entries from the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and India. There is a nice blend of cultures in the results.

Teachers and students are always presenting. Every lesson involves some presentation, though hopefully not always formal and not always with slides.

Look at the winners and you'll see some samples you might use as guides for yourself or your students. Not all of them work for me. (There were over 400 entries, so there must be some you can use.)

There's one about Flickr that is pretty pictures and few words. There's something to be said for the Steve Jobs approach to presentations and we have all suffered through the 60 slides with 6 bullets per and no design sense at all.

But there's no way I could judge this "presentation" without hearing the presenter. Companies spend big bucks to have professional presentations created for their staff. For example, the new product PowerPoint that all the salespeople will take on the road. Hopefully, it's "presenter-proof" and just running through it with some guidance should work. We also know that's a dream. Bad presenter; bad presentation. Great presenters do a good job even if they have paper handouts and no technology. I think the same holds true for the best teachers. They make learning happen even without the technology, tools and materials - but give them all of that and they soar.

Another one from the contest called "The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging" would be more my choice. Nicely designed, with lots of good content. Not beautiful though. It's more the "leave behind" category while the previous example is "presenter support."

All of us should be thinking about that distinction when we create a presentation. If your leave-behind materials (or takeaways) will include handouts, spec sheets etc., you probably don't need to put it in the slides.

I've been to plenty of conferences where the presentation had everything I wanted to know & take away - but the presentation wasn't offered to me in any form. I desperately take notes!

I'm currently preparing 3 presentations for this summer season of conferences, so I'm looking and thinking about these things.