How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

Here’s something I picked up from a friend yesterday.

Most people already know if you have an iStockphoto account you can download free images every week. What I learned yesterday is that you can also download free videos every month.

This got me thinking, and I realised that with these high quality videos we can make our slides much more interesting.

Below, you can see two sample slides that I created in Keynote. In order to blend the text a little more into the video I used a 40 to 50% opacity on the text. This just helps to give a little movement behind the text.

Now, we do have to be careful here. As with anything, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and using videos in this way can overshadow your presentation. It certainly would not be a good idea to use videos like this in all your slides. That would take your audience’s attention away from you, but to add a little ‘extra’ something at the beginning of you presentation, then I think it would really by quite eye opening.

My advice is to use these videos as your welcome screen, and have it playing when your audience are arriving. What I did was set the video to play on a loop, so that if your welcome slide is up for 10, 20 or 30 minutes before you do your presentation, it actually gives your audience a feeling that you will be presenting in a different way. (I only hope that by now you are not using too many bullet points!!!)