Presentations have gone virtual. Talking heads are old school. So how do you make your virtual presentations exciting and interactive?
The goal is to remember the 3Es:
Engage, Educate and Entertain.
Rob Ferre, a speaker and game show host gave a presentation to professional speakers. He began by saying “Be the audience you want your audience to be.”
Move over lecturers. Today’s audiences are demanding and they want to be involved. Your greatest competition is not the next speaker- It’s the cell phone. Unless your audience is actively engaged they’ll be checking text messages. Be sure to create interaction every 8 minutes. A great way to combine interaction and entertainment is to use tools and games. Here are a few that Rob shared with the audience.
Tools
Mentimeter-an interactive easy to use polling platform that enables you to prepare, present, and analyze presentations. You can also make use of the built in polling in Zoom.
Kahoot-a game based learning platform which creates user based multiple choice quizzes. It can be accessed by a smart phone, tablet, or computer.
Miro-the ultimate white board that makes collaboration easy.
Games
The Big 8 - Put 8 people in breakout rooms for 2 minutes and ask them to find 1 thing they all have in common.
Family Feud - Adapt the TV show to an online game. Program it for the top 5 company pain points or other issues. It can be serious or funny.
Legit or Quit - Choose real and fake book titles. Show the book cover with the title and ask the audience to say Legit (if they think it’s real title ) and say Quit if they think it’s a fake title.
Hair There - Show pictures of the top of a man’s hair line from celebrities and then show the hairlines of the company managers. The audience guesses who the hairline belongs to. And speaking of hair, a team of men had a beard contest. They voted on who had the best beard and whose beard most looked like Sigmund Freud, Blackbeard the pirate, Salvador Dali, Caesar, etc.
Virtual learning doesn’t have to be and shouldn’t be boring. Use a variety of engagement techniques to build into your content to deliver a knockout presentation in person or virtually.