Chapter 18
GIVING A PRESENTATION USING A COMPUTER
Chapter overview
This chapter motivates students to use a computer presentation — and gives practical advice on
how.
Brief outline of the chapter
I. What equipment do you need? This section briefly covers the necessary equipment and
gives tips.
II. How should you design your presentation? This section urges students to build almost
everything on each slide, choose transition effects carefully, consider special features such
as sound and video, and begin and end with opaque slides.
III. How should you give your presentation? This section acknowledges that giving a computer
presentation — once it has a good design — is usually easy compared to giving other types
of presentations.
IV. Exercises.
General comments
Most students know how to give a computer presentation. But they’re quite interested to know
how to give a good one.
Additional exercise
A good in-class exercise is to have pairs of students design the cover slide, blueprint slide, and
one body slide for a presentation and then simply show the results to the rest of the class.
Notes on the exercises
Exercise A (explaining how to build a slide)
I almost always have my slides come on at first with only the title and title elements. That way, I
Exercises B and C (giving presentations that students designed in earlier exercises)