Structuring your presentation
Now that we are back in the classroom it already seems as though the holiday had never happened! Over the next few weeks I will be talking to my students about presentations. One ofmy students has already asked me: “What do I need to do to get a good mark in my presentation?” and that’s what we’ll be focusing on in class.
In this post I’m going to just mention ONE thing about presentations, and that is the idea of AUTHENTICITY. ‘Authentic’ is an interesting word which means lots of things in different contexts. It has the general meaning of TRUE, REAL. The worst thing that a student can do in a presentation is present information to the audience that everybody already knows. What is the point? There is no point. So when I tell my students that their presentation has to be AUTHENTIC I mean that it has to be original and include their own ideas.
Once you have started to think about how you can make your presentation ORIGINAL and AUTHENTIC then you can start to think about other things such as language and structure. One of my favourite video resources on presentations which I often direct students to is on the LLAS website and you can watch it and learn about how to structure an academic presentation here.