Student Presentations: Sharing What They Learn

Communication skills are essential to success in the work place. Presentation skills are a more specific extension of general communication skills, and can distinguish your students to any employer. Asking your students to give a presentation enhances these critical skills. Integrating presentations into your course will help your students learn how to:

• Choose a topic
• Craft a message befitting a presentation
• Prep for a presentation
• Use presentation technology
• Speak in front of a group and improve these speaking skills.

Students can be intimidated by public speaking; especially if they have not had an opportunity to practice. Adding a presentation assignment in your course, like any other skill based activity, requires you to build the scaffolding throughout the course that helps students learn and apply effective presentation concepts. Add supporting resources and content to your course that describes what an effective presentation is. Include tips and strategies for delivering effective presentations. Build a rubric that outlines what you consider to be an 'A' presentation. Finally, provide examples of great presentations for your students to model from. 

Perhaps most importantly, build in opportunities for practice. Too often an end of course presentation is the only time students  implement the art of  giving a presentation. This does not allow for smaller practice sessions where your students receive feedback from you, classmates and even assess themselves. By doing this, when it comes time for the end of the course presentation, your students have become better presenters and ultimately better communicators. At NEIT, we have seen instructors creatively add student presentations to courses including an elevator pitch presentation, a project management status presentation to stakeholders, and  a virtual academic poster presentation.

There are tenets and models for effective presentation. It is important to be clear with your students about the type of presentation you expect. Is it a TedTalk? Send students to So you want to give a Ted talk? Links to an external site. and How to Create Your TED Talk Links to an external site. (and of course link your students to an example of your favorite Ted presentation). Do you want your students to focus on an engaging visual story telling, consider the Pecha Kucha Links to an external site. presentation model using PowerPoint Links to an external site.. When presenting scientific or technical information the Assertion Evidence Links to an external site. approach for improving audience comprehension may be appropriate.  You might even have your students try these different types throughout your course as a series of warm ups, leading to the bigger, end of course presentation where they marry the best of each model.

Canvas Discussions are often used for student presentations. Working individually or in groups, students can record a presentation and upload it to a discussion. This can be an audio only (oral) presentation or a full video presentation. You can also ask students to use discussion responses to comment and provide feedback to specific presentations.

Use Canvas to deliver the building blocks your students need to understand what an effective presentation is. Add content to your Canvas modules that explains and demonstrates how to create and deliver presentations, include video examples and your expectations for the presentation via a rubric.

Visit Screencasting for tips on how to guide your students when recording a presentation, along with the tools your students can use to make these recordings. Add this student handout How to Upload a Video to Canvas Download How to Upload a Video to Canvas

to your course. It walks students through the different ways video can be uploaded to Canvas. Note: embedding a video in a discussion post is included. Although embedding takes an extra step for students, it means the video can be viewed in context versus when a video file is attached to a discussion and the video must be downloaded to be viewed.

In an era of working from home, the ability to give an effective online presentation is fast becoming a necessary skill. Asking your students to give presentations synchronously online helps to hone this skill in this context. Using Zoom you can ask your students to present online together. The fundamentals of effective presentation remain but there are some unique considerations:

• 10 Tips for Giving Virtual Presentations Links to an external site.
• Links to an external site.Presenting in Zoom Checklist Links to an external site.
• Links to an external site.Win Over the Zoom Links to an external site.

As stated above, presentation practice improves performance and confidence. Have your students develop online presentation skills by adding mini Zoom 'stand ups' throughout the course. Your students can focus on building online listener engagement by tasking them to target a specific Zoom tool:

• craft a mini presentation with an embedded poll for their classmate audience,
• demonstrate a website or software adding sharing a screen to their Zoom presentation and
• extend the screen share by adding annotation.

Experiencing the varied tools and techniques available in Zoom one at a time in these mini presentations is not about encouraging bells and whistles. Instead via this low stakes high value practice your students learn what each tool does well, when to use it and how not to over use it.

For more information visit the Zoom: Everything you need to know page and the Tips & Tricks: Teachers Educating on Zoom Links to an external site.resource--although written for teachers it contains useful info and resources for anyone making a Zoom presentation.