Sprinkling Magic on your Presentations

This week’s friendlybrain tip comes to you from Justin Collinge – the most recent member of the Kaizen team.  Welcome Justin!

You know that moment when a toddler first begins to be able to move unaided? Suddenly everything in the house needs to be vetted for breakability and moved out of reach. Years ago when my twins were 3 and exploring I had to decide whether to teach them not to post digestive biscuits into the video (‘video’? Yes it was a while ago – they’re 22 now) or buy one of those plastic covers to prevent access. The motto that carried us through that time was ‘Right use was a better answer to wrong use than no use’.

Have you noticed the current reaction against the use of technology within team meetings, training events and presentations? So many people are feeling jaded with lengthy PowerPoint presentations which feature clever, but ultimately distracting, animations and colourful backgrounds that assault the senses rather than support the content. Some have even turned their back on the technology deeming it unhelpful. As I observe this I find myself reminded of my toddlers. Rather than discover a right use, trainers and presenters are beginning to resort to no use. There is another way ...

Interactive whiteboards provide the trainer with the perfect environment to bring learners into the content, whether physically up at the board or simply by responding to suggestions. It can give a flexible, even apparently magical, setting to explore whatever content is required. For example, have you ever collated a set of ideas on a flipchart? Then what? Typed them up later to email out? Blu-tac’d the list up on the wall? With an interactive whiteboard you can have the handwriting turn instantly into text (a ‘magical’ moment all on its own) and then you’re able to move the words around - grouping them by importance, frequency, urgency, creativity, or whatever is the issue. Instead of a static collection of words jumbled together you now have the ability to re-group, delete or highlight. I’ve done this sort of activity in the past with post-it’s. The whiteboard allows everyone to see what’s going on, to take part in the process by moving things they want to change and then it can be printed or emailed instantly to all the delegates. Imagine doing an Ishikawa or Pareto analysis, or just a brainstorm, using this sort of flexibility.

PowerPoint is appealing because it offers the chance to bring in colours, graphs and charts and even some sound effects. However being brain friendly is much more than being entertaining. Allow the environment to be passive and very little will stick – even if it was entertaining at the time. Effective learning is active and involved. It requires the learner to create their own learning. It demands a response and an interaction with the content. Here is a real-life example of where an interactive whiteboard gave the opportunity to do this while raising the emotional energy in the room:

In the middle of the event we linked to a video illustrating an issue. At various points during the video I pressed a button on the screen which caused the software to take a still picture and store it elsewhere. At the end of the 4 minute video I closed the video player screen to reveal around a dozen still pictures taken of various points in the process we had just watched. One of the delegates came to the screen and using his finger dragged the pictures apart and began to put them in order (with a fair amount of heckling from his team-mates!) After some animated discussion with the rest of the room he had sequenced the pictures and then another delegate began the process of selecting salient slides and dragging the unwanted pictures to the bin, leaving five on the screen. Re-sizing one chosen picture we dragged it to a new page where we began to annotate and label it as a group. (The software allowed all label lines to be straight arrows and all writing turned straight into text). When this was finished we turned back to the remaining four pictures, resized them and repositioned them before printing them out for syndicates to tackle a similar process. Fifteen minutes later a digital camera allowed their work to be instantly up on screen and discussed and adapted as a larger group.

Notice how the delegates were all involved in the whole process. It wasn’t a matter of an ‘expert’ sharing his knowledge so much as the whole room caught up and creating their own learning. The process involved movement, pictures, discussion, logical sequencing, making decisions, the ability to try something and then change it, all in a dynamic - even fun- environment. Everyone not only owned the end result but is so much more likely to remember and embed the practice than if I had simply told them what they needed to know.

This description of a moment during a training session illustrates a small part of what’s possible. To a facilitator the whiteboard, with its amazingly flexible and intuitive software, gives a huge variety of engaging possibilities. Instead of a sequence of slides with a fixed order, bullet point two flying in after bullet point one, the trainer is now able to respond to questions, change direction as needed and maintain an atmosphere of exploration rather than a predetermined one-way flow of information.

Of course there are other technology solutions that work wonderfully in harmony with interactive whiteboards allowing even more flexibility. Voting systems (like the ‘ask the audience’ moment on ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’) can give the trainer the chance to check in with the delegates at any moment. They can be used to gauge interest or to encourage people to take a position rather than sit apathetically. Wireless slates, gyroscopic mice, visualisers (a kind up up-market OHP) and webcams all give new opportunities for active learning. Admittedly they all also can be used as gimmicks to keep attention without enabling learning, even distracting from the learning - ‘all sizzle and no substance’. As one person commented recently, “No amount of technology will turn a bad trainer into a good one”. That’s why the principles of brain-friendly learning need to be underpinning whatever goes on.

However, keep true to the BFL principles and technology will allow you to fly where before you could only walk. Rather than resort to just throwing the technology away why don’t you explore what is possible? What about investing some time and energy into discovering some of the magical new ways we can now interact with trainees?

I never did regret teaching my children ‘right use’. They never