Doing presentation at work - AIBU to ask for tips?

[LimaLemur]

I’ve been invited with colleagues at work to a workshop on presenting. We've all been asked to think of something that we’d like to do a 5-minute presentation on and to prepare a presentation on it, although we may not all get called up to present.

I realise this workshop is about helping us to learn skills on presenting confidently, so I’m sure we’ll learn lots of new ideas on how to present, but I want to think of something interesting I can present on and am a bit stuck.

I’m really interested in French culture and language so was thinking I could do a presentation on French music, maybe? I could play some music as part of the presentation and hand out visual aids as part of it. What do you all think? I’m a bit stuck on how to structure it so I deliver something interesting and memorable. Would like to be funny too, if possible.

Nearpod is a really good resource you can do the presentation via your phone. It’s free and very simple. They can then use their phones to access (they just type in a code which you get when you publish the presentation) they can then do things such as type in their answers to a question, or do quizzes, a pin board of answers, they can even draw their answers so they could do something funny such as draw a self portrait. Or you can upload a picture and get them to draw over it.

I was once told to:

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them.
2. Tell them
3. Tell them what you’ve told them.

Also agree it's too much and seems like you're trying to condense a school lesson into 5 mins. Depending on how many people are there, handing out visual aids will take most of your 2 mins alone: you can't talk well whilst people are distracted passing stuff around.

If you're not doing teacher training and the course is about presentation skills, then focus on actually presenting. A good presenter can engage an audience on any topic without interactive gimmicks and that should be what you're trying to get out of the training course.

Also, have you thought about what message you want people to leave with? With only 5 minutes, I would suggest you just need one sentence. Start with that and frame the presentation around how you get there.

Ie, "to know who artist X is and how they are important to French music"

Finish up by telling them that "Brel" is always a useful answer in that perennial pub favourite, name five famous Belgians"

We run similar workshops where I am: interactive is good - but I think playing the song/translating is too much for the time you've allowed. You need to be clear about your objectives, and that'll give you some idea of what you want to do to achieve them - is it to learn about Brel, basic French, French music? Figure that out and go from there.

So - learn basic French? Include a matching word/definition quiz
Basic first aid? Bandaging a finger (you demonstrate, they practice on each other)
Reading a tube map? Pairs exercise etc

Other stuff that works well in 5 minutes is stuff like demonstrating an app, napkin folding , something that's a discrete activity, basically, that requires you to demonstrate a bit of context, then some sort of demo/detailed explanation, activity, wrap up.

Actually, best one I ever saw was one on gift wrapping strange shapes

I honestly think it's still too long. We did a similar sort of thing and we all went massively over.

I think that the first three and the last bit of the talk that youv'e suggested (yesterday at 19.26) will take longer than you've said and you'll probably fill in the 5 minute without the gap fill exercise/song performance.

Plus also, unless you are very competent with powerpoint or whatever, it's a bit of a risk/too big a distraction to have embedded music and videos.

Agree with others that it's too much for the time. What you've described would be fun but take half an hour! Also there's no clear message/purpose . Decide what your message is, then decide how best to present it. Interaction should only be used with a purpose (e.g. to practise a skill/find out what your audience have learned ) and not just for the sake of it. 5 mins isn't long enough for interaction as you won't be able to deal with anything that arises or adapt your talk accordingly

Done and dusted! :)

I changed it quite a bit (split it into separate sections about Jacques Brel) and it went really well! I’m so relieved - I was so nervous haha.

Glad it went well, OP!

Thanks, Incognita! And thanks so much to everyone else who posted on here - your tips were really helpful! :)