As an educator, it’s imperative that every element should contribute to the student’s learning experience. However, just because you’re within four walls of the classroom doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think outside the box. In fact, you should always strive to come up with interesting, impressive, memorable, and powerful tools to help you impart precious knowledge to students.
One of these tools is the presentation, and it is therefore a must that you learn presentation skills.
Important Presentation Skills to Learn as a Teacher
It is important to make your students look forward to every class, and your presentation skills have a lot to do with this. You give your students variety, and break from the monotony which can result in loss of their interest.
Presentation skills include public speaking. You must be audible, articulate, and clear. You should keep to your topic, being organized in the thoughts you express, while still being brief and lively. You should also keep making eye contact to your students throughout your presentation or class, as this shows connection to your audience while at the same time engaging them and drawing them to you.
In addition to public speaking skills, the other half of your presentation involves the visuals—your illustrations and teaching aids. Today, many educators go beyond the traditional, and use a more interactive and dynamic approach with the help of slideshow presentations.
Interesting Presentations Liven Up Classroom Discussions
While the traditional chalk-on-board discussion is still widely used, there’s still something about projected presentations that grab the attention of the audience. This is because such presentations allow you, the educator, to let out your creativity through each relevant slide, piquing the interest of your audience, the students, while still making them learn in the process.
However, there are still presentations that are indeed dull, and unfortunately, these give all presentations in general a bad rep for being the same. And this is why, more than ever, teachers must have impeccable presentation skills. From preparation to public speaking and to the creation of the slides themselves, teachers must know how to break the mold and create presentations that students will appreciate and remember.
Creating powerful presentations is easier said than done, and not many succeed at it. Nevertheless, learning presentation skills, and constantly improving on them, can mean the difference between being a successful, inspiring teacher and a class that students just want to be over and done with.
Besides, there are free PowerPoint backgrounds and templates that make it easy for you to create stunning slideshows for any topic, purpose, or audience.
Powerful Presentations Result in Better Student Attention Spans
Students can easily get bored, no matter their age. They get easily preoccupied, and many simply don’t have much of a long attention span to sit through a class. Teachers have a big challenged to constantly think up ways to keep students entertained while they learn. With the help of presentations, this is highly possible.
It’s been shown that people have a better chance at understanding and retaining information when they can see it. Therefore, oral presentations are not enough. You can use visual aids, such as illustrations on the chalkboard. However, it is still better to have something projected for the whole class to see more clearly even for the last student at the back. Such projected slideshows also make the presentation flow much more smoothly, as you discuss different topics while keeping a close eye on your class. This also helps encourage eye contact to your students, since you’re not turning your back while writing things down on the chalkboard.
Presentations also make classroom discussions more interactive. This is true especially for today’s presentations, wherein PowerPoint slides are used. You can take advantage of PowerPoint’s many advanced features. You can also access the numerous and wide range of online resources to get professional presentation templates, backgrounds, animations, effects, icons, shapes, and many other slide components to help you create your best slideshows.
Superb Presentation Skills Make Up Teaching Success
Aside from the ability to create dynamic, animated, and vibrant slides, you can also find that having presentation skills also determine your success as a teacher. This is because presentation skills allow you to vary your teaching strategies. You can use a straight-up discussion while still injecting icebreakers, relevant questions and answers, challenging activities, and class projects.
Remember: When it comes to presentation skills in the classroom, a delicate balance of oral and visual elements must be present. While you can use PowerPoint slides, these are only supplements to your discussion and they should not replace you as a teacher.
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Brianne Walter
