Hallowe’en and presentation horror stories

As a Trainer with the TATP, one of my responsibilities has been to design and teach a workshop for TAs on Classroom Presentations.  Within the workshop, we review a number of resources to provide inspiration to create dynamic and engaging classroom presentations.

Getting into the spooky spirit, I would like to share a Hallowe’en twist on one of these resources.

Slideshare.net is a website for sharing slide decks that can be easily emailed, linked, and shared on the web. Slideshare sometimes runs contests to identify the best slide decks. In one iteration of the contest, they ran a Presentation Horror Story Contest.

Boom or Bust, is one of my favourite winners from the presentation horror stories contest, because the creators draw on traditions from comic books to tell a story through their slides.  The types of images shown in Boom or Bust can be easily created using a software package like Comic Life.

If you are looking for a more general slide deck on presentation, I also recommend the tongue and cheek ‘You Suck at Powerpoint.’ It offers some up-to-date suggestions to make your presentation graphically appealing. If you are looking at SlideShare.net keep in mind that you may need to translate concepts from business to educational contexts to make them relevant for your students.