Oral Presentation on Digital Media Communication

Unit Learning Outcomes Reflected in assignment:

• Deliver an effective oral presentation (CLO 2)
• Design effective PowerPoint or Prezi slides (CLO 2)
• Use visuals effectively in a presentation (CLO 2)

Introduction:

This unit’s assignment is an oral presentation with PowerPoint or Prezi slides that allows you to practice composing, organizing, and delivering an oral presentation with technology. 

Directions:  

Because of your expertise in business communication, you have been called in to consult on a company’s digital communication practices. It is your job to analyze the company’s digital footprint (their website and use of social media) to identify their communicative strengths and weakness and to make recommendations for improvement. 

You will choose the company whose web presence you wish to analyze and use what you have learned so far in this course to prepare a 7-8 minute PowerPoint or Prezi presentation with audio in which you present your findings to the company. 

Follow the guidelines for preparing a good presentation in Ch. 19 on Oral Presentations, and pay careful attention to the checklist for oral presentations on pg. 640, as well as the tips on slide design on pg. 630. 

To help you analyze the site, use the articles from this unit and what you have learned so far in this course about effective business communication.  You may want to review pgs. 174- 176 in the visuals chapter for information on effective web page design.

Also, you should keep in mind that you are presenting your material to your hypothetical company, so remember to speak to your audience and think about how you can build or maintain goodwill, even when you are pointing out the shortcomings of their website.  (You may want to quickly review the techniques you learned in Chapter 3 on goodwill and Ch. 10 on negative messages.).

The project will allow you to demonstrate several important business communication skills:

• Professional use of presentation software (such as Powerpoint, Prezi)
• Oral communication/presentation skills
• Organization of information for audience comprehension
• Business style (including editing, clarity, you-attitude, positive emphasis, etc.)
• Slide/document design and use of visuals

There are several ways you can get audio into a presentation:

1. PowerPoint with audio using VoiceThread (free trial version available. See: http://voicethread.com/howto/registering-for-a-new-account-2/ (Links to an external site.))
2. Use a microphone and record narration directly in PowerPoint (inexpensive microphones are available in most big box electronics stores)
3. Record an audio file for each slide using a microphone or cel phone app and embed sound files in each slide

There are many online tutorials on recording and adding audio; here are a few to start with:

Remember, PowerPoint and Prezi are visual mediums, so your images need to carry some of the important message you are conveying.  Screenshots are one obvious source of visual content, and the snipping tool included in the accessories of the windows operating systems can be a really easy way to quickly capture a portion of a website for your presentation.  Also, remember the work we did in the visuals chapter and use the information to help you select appropriate and effective images and to design your slides so they are visually appealing and effective for the audience.