Presentation Skills

Every move, phrase, mistake, anecdote and slide should actually contain content. It should be meaningful. Your mistakes should teach them, your demos should teach them; even your shortcut keys, utilities and menu layout should teach them. A presentation isn’t an opportunity to read your slides. Remember that most people can read silently to themselves 5 to 10 times faster that you can read to them out loud. Your job as a presenter is to read in between the lines, and provide them structure. Your slides should be treated as your outline – they are structure, scaffolding, nothing more. If you jam your slides full of details and dozens of bullets, you might as well take your content at write an article. It’s difficult to listen to someone talk and read their slides at the same time – remember that when you design your content. YOU are the content, and your slides is your Table of Contents.
[From Scott Hanselman's Weblog]

You'd be surprised how often people comment that they really like my teaching style, which they say is "not reading to them." I've had people that have been taking technical training for 30-40 years, and they ask me where I learned my teaching techniques. It just seems almost common sense that if you are teaching someone something that you need to be filling in the blanks. There are many different ways to do this, and I've never been able to pinpoint how it happens. Some classes you get everyone on the ball, who really like digging into stuff and playing. Good times. In some classes, the students have been moved from data entry and they need to learn how to maintain a simple VB front end. Sometimes, nothing seems to be going right at all.

Perhaps my favorite story involved the class from hell. I was in a classroom that fit 8 people comfortably -- 10 was the limit without people being packed together like a defensive line in the back seat of a Volkswagen. Well, with 10 people scheduled, 13 people showed up. Seems our new scheduling / sales system dropped the ball on some out of town registrations. So I've got people sitting in the hallway trying to follow along as they get their first taste of COM programming and classes. What could be more enjoyable? Anyways, they get me moved into a larger classroom, but while it's a larger classroom, it is still miserable because this is not a classroom setup for a technical class. Some problems with the SQL Server setup, not to mention the room just wasn't conductive to a projector lead course. But, things turned out ok even though I stumbled through some bizarro COM issues related to a goofed up install of some of the labs by the technicians. One lady wrote on the end of week evaluation "I like how Phil makes mistakes and shows us how to fix them. This is also how I learn." Scott is right, sometimes when things go wrong, you can still teach them by showing how to recover and explain why things are goofed. I of course would prefer things work perfectly, but the dude abides.