Practicing Public Speaking
Photos by: Naomi Thompson
My aim for the Spring 2015 was to practice public speaking. It seems like quite many opportunities were made available through conference presentations, webinars, workshops etc. The journey has been a huge learning curve and a lot of fun at the same time. I’d like to share a short reflection on my experience, by focusing on my discovery of the Keynote application as a helpful tool.
At the recent AERA conference in Chicago, I had the chance to present research I have had the pleasure to work on with Dr. Karen Wohlwend and Dr. Kylie Peppler. The work relates to the design of a new curricular model for making that helps facilitate and reverse approaches to making in holistic ways: the Design Playshop Model.
This was my first AERA presentation and my first US conference presentation ever! I was super excited and also pretty anxious to get it all right. Our work was a qualitative study and included many cases to illustrate orientations to making and how the merging of orientations deepened and broadened children’s engagement with making. At the same time, my presentation was only supposed to be 12 minutes long. In this short time, only some salient examples could be shared.
Given my level of experience, rather than cutting rich content, I decided to partly script the presentation and to use paper notes to help me while presenting. The night before leaving to Chicago, I discovered the Keynote iPhone application that can be connected to Mac Books and makes the iPhone act like a clicker. This tool helped me tremendously during my presentation especially because it let me reference my notes on my phone rather than bring paper. Here is how the application works:
Open Keynote on the computer and on the iPhone while being connected to the same wifi on both devices. Let the app find the computer.
Once it computer and phone are connected, you can click play.
The presentation starts on the computer, and as you swipe the phone the slides change on the computer. I set the phone view to display the current slide plus notes, but other views are possible too (e.g., next slide + notes, just current slide etc.). The current slide plus notes made me feel comfortable presenting and allowed me to better engage with the audience. I was flexible to move and had the option to glance at my notes without appearing as if I was reading. One big plus was that the AERA wifi was so reliable!
