Teaching Comparative

Preparing for the new school year

Guy Kawasaki was part of Apple's Macintosh team and is now a venture capitalist. He often has ideas that extend beyond his specialty. That's why his December 2005 blog entry is still one of his most popular pieces.

As you plan for teaching the upcoming school year, here's some advice to think about. Just mentally substitute "class" for "meeting" and "students" for "venture capitalists." Then adapt Kawasaki's ten topics to the topic you want to teach and the audience to which you are presenting.

Don't beat yourself up about not being able to meet Kawasaki's rule. It's a good target. But, I don't have to tell you to that neither Kawasaki's nor Reynolds' (see the recommendation at the bottom) ideas are totally applicable to the classroom. After all you get do several presentations a day -- often each one unique. And your technical support, preparation time, and budgets are incredibly limited compared to those accessible to the people who are pitching ideas to people like Guy Kawasaki. And neither of them is likely to deal with audience members acting out or parental concerns about grades.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

"...I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points...

"Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal... If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:
1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action


"You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes... Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

"The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

"The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well...

"One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds."

---

Presentation Zen, is Garr Reynolds' blog on issues related to professional presentation design. It looks like it has a lot of thoughtful advice about how you present yourself and your messages. When I looked this morning, I read an interesting consideration of the use of a podium.

posted by Ken Wedding @ 10:01 AM