Presentation Tools 2: Making Slides with Haiku Deck

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It's Presentation Tools Week on the blog; yesterday was all about using non-standard fonts in PowerPoint, and the next few days are all about not using PowerPoint at all. Here's the first of three useful alternatives to PPT.

Haiku Deck (haikudeck.com)

This a very easy to use, very useful tool for making slides. It almost forces you to make attractive and effective presentations, by limiting you to only desirable options (whereas PowerPoint is full of features which actively harm your presentations!).

Haiku Deck is free to use on the web, or you can download the iPad app, also free. It gives you templates - not ugly PowerPoint templates, but attractive ways of doing slides using semi-transparent text boxes and large fonts, a method I recommend on my training courses. The software encourages you to use images effectively, not pack too much text in, and make one point per slide - all absolute essentials for good presentations. (Unfortunately there is actually a 'bullet point list' option for slides, but luckily most users seem to ignore this.)

Here's a nice Haiku Deck example I found, from Tricia LaRue:

It's Banned Books Week! - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Haiku Deck is entirely self-contained - you choose a style (which includes fonts), slide templates, and even find your Flickr CC images, all within the package online. This screengrab shows you pretty much all the important things at once:

You can see I've chosen CINEMATIC from the themes along the top - this dictates the fonts, and also put a filter on all the images, which is a nice touch. There are different filters for each theme, and they're there to make the text easier to read and to help get a consistent feel to the deck. Down the left-hand side are the various layout options for this particular slide. To find the image in my example I just typed it into Haiku's own search box - it hunts for appropriately licensed Flickr images to match your search terms, and automatically credits the author and provides a link! Which is an excellent thing. (Here's an example of that, with the image credit for the pic in my screengrab, which is by ectaticist.) Along the bottom is the Add Slide button, and the preview slides (of which there is only one in my example) for you to cycle through and edit. 

Overall I think Haiku Deck is an excellent way to put together effective and attractive slides quickly. The only disadvantage is it is relatively inflexible - but of course this is also what makes it so good. It's quick, and you're locked down to only the most useful options.

When you want to present data or graphs (or your own screengrabs), or have a very varied slide-deck, Haiku perhaps isn't the right option. Otherwise, give it a shot: haikudeck.com.

Next up on the blog tomorrow, Canva.

Presentation Tools 1: Fontsquirrel

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I love a good presentation. I think they're often the best way to communicate information, and I create them as stand-alone online objects as well as for actual talks to an audience. So it's Presentation Tools Week on the blog - seven different useful tools from the list below, explored over the next five days.

These fall into two broad categories: tools for creating presentations from scratch, and tools for making PowerPoint presentations better in some way

When I began giving presentations 5 years ago, I remember looking at Bobbi Newman's, Buffy Hamilton's and Helene Blowers' Slideshare accounts and being amazed that slides could look so beautiful. My horizons were truly expanded; previously every PPT I'd seen had been functional, boring, and (as I later learned) ineffective as a communication method. I learned by trying to expose my brain to as many great ways of putting together a PowerPoint presentation as possible, and trying things out to see what worked for me.

These days things are a lot easier, as there are several helpful tools which assist you in creating effective and pretty slides. Some of them do a lot of the work for you, and some of you provide a helping hand for specific elements of a presentation. I've summarised the 7 tools I think Past Me would have found most useful. Hopefully if you're reading this you can take something from one or more of these platforms too.

Tomorrow we'll look at an alternative to PowerPoint, but for now we'll look at working with it, using non-standard fonts. It took me a long time to realise just how important fonts were to a good presentation.

FONTSQUIRREL (fontsquirrel.com)

FontSquirrel is a website full of downloadable fonts, and I use it ALL the time - it's the first port of call for non-standard fonts. I think using new fonts which we're not all over-saturated with from the Office suite can make a HUGE difference to how good a presentation or poster looks, and everything on FontSquirrel is free even for commercial use.

Examples from FontSquirrel

I use Megalopolis Extra in loads of presentations, along with Aller, Caviar Dreams, ChunkFive Roman, Quicksand Book, and Pacifico. You need admin permissions to install fonts on your PC, so if you can't have that permanently at work, try and get it for a couple of hours, go onto FontSquirrel, and go mad downloading interesting fonts. Once you install them they install across the Office Suite, so you can use them in Word as well. Try it!

(NB: An alternative to FontSquirrel is DaFont, which I've heard people recommend, but I can't vouch for it as I've never used it myself.)

Remember to save your PPT as a PDF when using non-standard fonts! Otherwise when you come to present on a different PC without the fonts installed, it will almost certainly go horribly wrong.

Some guidance around fonts - generally it is thought that you should use a maximum of 3 fonts per presentation (although as with all 'rules' around presenting, feel free to break this one if you have a good reason), and my personal minimum font size is 36 for slides.

Font-pairing is an art I feel like I've not mastered at all, but would like to - I found the following (albeit very brief) presentation helpful:

The Ultimate Guide to Font Pairing from Guy Kawasaki

3 Training courses coming up this Winter in London

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Click the pic to go to the upcoming events page

Just a brief post to draw your attention to three workshops I'm running in London in November and December. All of these are open for anyone to book onto (unlike some of the things I do for the British Library, for example), and full details of each can be found on the Upcoming Events page.

People have fun on these courses and find them genuinely useful - the idea is to give practical advice which can be applied the minute you get back to your desk. You can see feedback from previous workshops via the links on the Training page. Any questions about content etc, let me know!

7 tips for increasing student engagement with academic induction

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One for the Academic Librarians, this. It's Week 1 of the new academic year at my institution, which means one thing: Induction. I've looked after a lot of Departments in my relatively short time as an Academic Liaison Librarian, and have tried constantly to hone induction and make it more interesting - below are the seven most productive changes I've made to how things work.

That said, one thing I've learned for sure is one size does NOT fit all, and what works for the culture of one Department might not work for another. So have a look at these, see if you think any of them might be useful, and ignore the ones which aren't.

When I think back to my student days, I remember having ZERO interest in Library induction. For the BA I went on the tour, for the MA I went to a lecture - but in neither case was I at all engaged. And that's how almost every student naturally is. It's really helpful to think about this properly - not as a librarian, but as a prospective student who has no idea of the value of what they're about to hear. How do you get that across? How do you relate what you're saying to their real world? Essentially, how do you shake then out of their indifference?

1. Don't tell them everything, open a dialogue

It's tempting to unleash the full fury of Everything There Is To Know About The Library (particularly if you only get one session with a particular group of students) but there's only so much you can cram in before it all becomes overwhelming. Better to pick some key messages and focus on getting engagement for them.

The brain can hold on to 5 or 6 new things at time, 7 if you're super-clever, so a lot of my sessions are literally called things like 'Six Useful Things for [Department] Students' - and they leave a lot out. I either then put other vital information in a booklet / handout, or make sure it's all available via the main online link I give them, the Subject Guide for their Department.

You want to open a dialogue in Induction - ensuring the students come back to you, or to the Library, or to the various online spaces, for more when they need it.

2. Don't JUST tell them about the Library, talk about other useful things too

This has been a revelation for me. I tell my students about a mixture of non-library things (for example filter-bubble free searching via DuckDuckGo, social media dashboards and the students guide to social, useful services like Zetoc, networks like Academia.edu, useful tools like Evernote - AND I tell them about the Library, about JSTOR, and all the regular stuff. The result is hugely improved feedback scores compared with my previous 'library only' inductions, and, amazingly, the thing they rate as MOST useful is the business about JStor and the Subject Guides. I think the students are more engaged overall because there's a feeling of 'he's not just telling us what he knows, he's telling us what WE need to know' and so they take note of the Library-related stuff more than they would otherwise. It smuggles it in.

(See an example of presentation which takes into account points 1, 2, 5 and 6 of this list.)

3. Scheduling really matters: move teaching BACK!

If you have any say at all in when your teaching happens, move it back. For some of my Departments I can't get this changed; it's embedded in certain parts of certain modules and needs to stay there. But for the rest, Week 4 is the earliest I teach.

Imagine being in Week 1 of your first year at University. You're in a new city, making new friends, finding out where you're going to LIVE - why on earth would anyone talking about how to find journal articles even register? Information literacy is undoubtedly useful, but it must be given MEANING and agency by a real life context. For example, just after the first assignment has been set. Then you really do need to know how to find and use the resources.

4. Make an interactive map

We no longer run tours of the Library, so we've found that students like the presentation to show where things are geographically, which works best in a Prezi. It's also easier for them to check back on areas of interest in their own time later.

There's a general Interactive Map of the Library, then most of us Academic Liaison Librarians take it, copy it, and adapt the copied version for our specific Department. Here's the specific History of Art map I used in an Induction session today.

If you want to make your own interactive map, all you need is a Prezi account and a PDF of your Library floorplans. There's a blogpost about what to do next, here.

5. Summarise with a Random Slide Challenge

A Random Slide Challenge uses volunteers to summarise your session for you, using slides they've never seen before - there's more on the mechanics of it here, see tip 3. I find it's a great way to end the session; everyone leaves smiling, and there's a genuine benefit for students seeing their peers sum up rather than just hearing me say the same things all over again.

Be warned though; you need enthusiasm, and prizes, to make this work! And numbers. I once had a session with only about 10 people in and couldn't get any volunteers, everyone was just too self-conscious in such a small group.

6. Make materials available online, after or during

We use Prezi, Slideshare and Scribd to make materials available - and all of these get embedded in our Departmental Subject Guides (LibGuides) as appropriate. It means students can refer back to what they missed, it means they stumble across them via Google searches, and it means if you have a link-heavy booklet students are using in the session, they can click the links rather than typing them in.

7. Check last year's feedback first

I know this is ridiculously obvious but I only started doing it last year.

Prior to that, I would check feedback right after a teaching session, and then I wouldn't look it again until one year later, to compare it with that year's feedback. Now, I go back over all the feedback just before creating my new year's materials and ALWAYS learn something useful which I use to revise the new content. Each Department has different styles and needs, too - it's helpful to be explicitly reminded of that by reading all the comments about what worked and what didn't the previous time the session ran.

BONUS TIPS: Some Twitter Wisdom

I asked my network on twitter for some more tips, and here they are.

Any more suggestions? Add them in a comment below.

Prezi Guide: The 5 Essentials To Stop Your Audience Feeling Sick

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Prezi is nothing if not divisive. Some people love it, some people hate it - I'm in neither of those camps. I find it very useful in some situations, but still use good old fashioned PowerPoint Slides for more than half the presentations I give. Prezi should be used for a reason.

Prezi is relatively new (it's been around since 2009), it's getting more popular (there are around 40 million users now) and it's improving its interface all the time. Some people accuse it of being style over substance, but for certain ideas (interactive maps, for example) it provides substance that slides simply can't bring to the table. For me, Prezi can be fantastic as long as you adhere to one maxim above all: don't let the medium get in the way of the message. Any presentation materials should be there to support the presenter and work FOR the audience in adding to their experience. Do that, and Prezi can really raise the level of an audience's engagement.

Potentially, a great Prezi has the wow factor. So why would you want to completely undermine that by creating something which makes sections of your audience feel motion-sickness? It's up to you, the presenter, to minimize the possibility of this as far as humanly possible. Here's how. (For the short version, view the Prezi about it.)

1. Positioning

The single most important thing about creating a Prezi is the positioning of the objects on the canvas (and directly related to this, the order in which they're visited on the path). Position your materials sympathetically, people! By which I mean, rather than moving haphazardly around the canvas and disorientating the viewer, move from left to right, or from top to bottom - move in a way the human brain is used to.

2. Distancing

But positioning is about more than putting your objects in a coherent pattern - it's about having a uniform (and short) distance between them. The closer you place your objects together, the less zoom and swoop there is in your prezi. Place them right next to each other and it won't zoom out at all, it will just slide right over from one object to the next.

3. Sizing

As with distancing, uniformity is the key to sizing too. Put similarly sized objects together - ideally make them the exact same size. This means there's no need to zoom in or out. Contrast this to having a small object followed by a much larger object and then a small object again: the zoom is flying all over the place.

4. Rotation

99.9% of rotations and barrel-rolls in Prezis add absolutely zero value to the presentation.

I just made that stat up but I'm sure it's true. In fact most of the time rotating actively detracts from a Prezi. It is the Number One cause of queasyness in the viewer. It can be used with a good reason (a visual metaphor of some kind to better express your ideas) but otherwise, why would you? It just gets in the way of your message.

5. Pacing

The ability to zoom in and out is both Prezi's strength and its weakness. It's what allows you to show the relationship between objects on your presentation, it's what allows the element of surprise for the big reveal, it's what lets you put your own hierachy onto your information rather than having it dictated to you. But it's also at the heart of what can induce nausea in your audience.

So, pace your Prezi like you would regular slides. Don't move it on every few seconds - arrive at point on your path, talk about it for two minutes, or five minutes, or more, and then move on. This means there are fewer zooms per presentation, and less quickly following one-another. But you can still take advantage of the zoom's ability to enhance your presentation.

One last note on zooming

If you double-click the right arrow to move your presentation on (or left arrow to move it back) it zooms twice as fast. This can be effective in reducing the sea-sick effect - after all it's the transitions which cause the problems, so if you only transition for 50% of the time you did before, that helps. The only downside is it feels risky; if you triple click by mistake, you'll miss your path point entirely and have to go back...

Here's my Prezi on this whole topic - it explains what I've just said in a visually illustrative way (which is sort of the point of Prezi after all):

Finally

All that said, if members of your audience are particularly susceptible to motion-sickness, even doing ALL of the above may not be enough. So only use Prezi for a specific reason. Use it to do something PowerPoint can't, rather than as a direct replacement for the sake of it. Use it to cover several dispirate topics, or to make something interactive, or to visually explain relationships between ideas. But if you don't need to do any of those things, and it's a regular presentation, just use regular slides. Just be sure to use them well.

Which leads us to a bonus option:

(6. The nuclear option)

Prezi can be a very useful way to make a nice looking presentation: the fonts, icons, ease of importing images, and themes, make smart presentation materials without the need for a huge amount of effort or design knowledge. Once you get over the initial learning curve, it's quicker to make a nice Prezi than nice slides. So if you want to take advantage of all that, but want to 100% eliminate the possibility of motion-sickness, simply save your Prezi as a PDF, and use it as you would slides. Every path point on your Prezi is a full-page of the PDF so it ends up looking like a (nice) PowerPoint.

To save a Prezi as a PDF, click the share icon and choose the relevant option from there.

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Disclaimer: Prezi will always make some people sick - they dislike Prezis intensely, and it's very important to them that they bring this up a lot. I offer no judgement here; I do the same with LinkedIn. But this guide is about stopping an audience feeling motion-sickness when watching a Prezi - if you aren't prepared to take steps to do this, you shouldn't be making Prezis!