Awesome Presentation Tips for Students

The majority of students all over the world face the need to create a presentation at least a few times throughout their academic careers. Not only do you need to create a presentation in PowerPoint or a similar program, but you also need to write a speech and stand in front of the whole class giving it. Pretty stressful, isn’t it? We have found some pretty cool and creative ideas for your presentation and some tips on how to feel more comfortable as a presenter. Let’s get started.

Be Creative but Wise

Each presentation is like a piece of art and can tell a lot about the personality of yours. Don’t be afraid to let it out. There are multiple various things that you can add to your presentation to make it stand out – pictures, animations, and a pitch of humor.

In the case of PowerPoint, there are multiple templates to choose from that are already carefully designed. However, you need to make sure that people can easily read what’s written on your slides, so it’s wise to avoid fancy fonts or too many colors. Use a pallet of 3-4 contrasting colors to make your slides vibrant and readable.

Keep Your Slides Simple

While the previous tip is great, don’t overuse various elements while designing your slides. Keep them simple and plan focus points that each of your slides will be dedicated to.

When working with text, it’s easy to overload your presentation with boring and long text paragraphs. What you should do instead is to break your text into short bullet points with keywords that you can talk about in detail when giving your speech.

Mind the Number of Your Slides

It seems a bit frustrating when there are too many slides that are hard to follow as a viewer. Make sure you understand how long your presentation will take and how many slides you should create in order to avoid rushing through them. Of course, it all depends on the topic of your presentation and its content, but in general, 15-20 slides are the perfect number.

Highlight Your Keywords

Contrasting colors can be used to highlight the main keywords or terms that your audience should pay attention to while you are talking. You can also try to put them in a column beside the text – this will make them easy to remember.

Use Visuals

When there are lots of information that your audience needs to remember, there is nothing better than visuals. Use images, tables, diagrams, and charts to illustrate your speech. It is much better than putting just plain text with nothing to focus your attention on.

You can illustrate your presentation with images from stocks or create an illustration of your own – just make sure the picture you are using is large enough to put on a slide and is relative to your speech’s content.

Use Effects

Special effects can make even the most boring presentation ten times better and more interesting. There are a lot of effects in the gallery that you can choose from, including effects that are used for slide change or for the elements on a slide itself. However, as was said earlier, don’t overuse them. Use a few effects throughout the whole presentation, or otherwise, it will look full of some random things going on.

Don’t Rush

It’s known that people in stressful situations tend to speak faster. That’s why sometimes it’s hard for us to understand the speech that we are listening too. Murmuring and rushing though your text and slides might seem like a good way to end it all faster; however, this way, you will only make your presentation look dull.

Practice Beforehand

Read your presentation out loud at home a few times before giving it to the class. You can even film yourself speaking in order to understand if everything goes smoothly and you are talking in the right tempo. Also, mind the volume of your voice. You should speak loud and clear enough, so even people sitting at the back of the class will hear you speaking.

Don’t Read From Slides

Have you ever seen a person that is giving a presentation while turned back to the audience? That is exactly how you will look if you try to read from your slides. Never do that and respect people who are sitting in front of you.

Prepare your note cards or printed speech to look at when giving your presentation. Try not to read it – memorize the major part of your speech instead. You might also find the format of an outline with bullet points comfortable to follow as you speak.