Evaluation From TechNet

I contacted Molly Mead to request the results for my presentation from their evaluation survey of the TechNet Conference. She responded that she would be able to provide them but that she hadn't received very many of the surveys back yet.

Updating My Presentation for Video Conference

Friday afternoon I met with Mike Jeffries to check out the Polycom video conferencing equipment. We talked about camera placement and if I needed to be "miked". We are going to try just using the Polycom microphone since I can project pretty well. I realized that the output is going to be either the camera view of me speaking or the PowerPoint presentation. That caused me to do some changes to my PowerPoint presentation. At TechNet I as able to walk over to the projection screen and point to areas of interest. With the VC set up I will need to add these "pointers" to my PowerPoint slides.

I spent about 4 hours on Saturday updating my slides.

I discovered an interesting feature with Adobe Reader. I added a link in my PPT to a PDF on my hard drive -"Microformats Cheat Sheet". In order to make it readable for the presentation I needed to "Zoom" to 200% or more. Adobe Reader "remembers" the changes that you make to the zoom setting and using [Alt] + the left or right arrow key you can return to the previous view or proceed to the next view. I'm going to try it out and if I become comfortable with it I will use this feature in my presentation on Friday.

Later this week Mike is going to do an equipment check with the other campuses that are hosting the VC. I hope to be able to use that time to test my media to be sure that everything works the way I have planned

Ready Set Go

I received tentative approval to begin working on my Ed Tech Internship under option 2 - Conference Presentation. I will need to begin collecting all my thoughts and artifacts related to my presentations this Spring.

The bulk of my work was in creating the Semantic Web presentation for the TechNet conference on March 12th. This presentation was different than the usual "How To" workshops because the semantic web is still developing. I had presented a paper in October of 2007 at the AACE E-Learn International Conference and wanted to leverage that information in my new presentation.

Some of the challenges that I foresaw were:

• Presenting a very technical topic to a semi-technical audience


• Creating interest in an evolving technology that is not fully implemented


• Since this was my first time to attend the TechNet conference, knowing what to expect in the level of web skills from the attendees


• Creating a "take-away" document that would provide sufficient structure and references even though my PowerPoint presentation would not be in outline/bulleted format

In addition, I wanted to utilize some of the principles and techniques for effective presentations that I had been reading about in Gar Reynold's and Nancy Duarte's books (Presentation Zen and Slide:ology)

• Minimize/eliminate bullet-points


• Use slide transitions that aid in unifying the presentation


• Consider the effects of color selection


• Only use 80% of the allotted time - no one ever complained because the speaker went to short.


• Recapture the audience's attention every 10 minutes