less boring, more useful presentations
The main thing to avoid is reading at people. If you’re in person, the worst version of this is a presenter half-to-three-quarters turned away from the audience, looking up at the screen and reading the same words everyone in the audience can see. Please never subject your people to this.
A few lightweight moves to get deeper engagement with your material:
“In a breakout room, discuss [prompt] with your group. By the end of the 8 minutes, you should have [answer that meets these criteria].”
“Read this slide to yourself for 15 seconds, then I’ll have a couple of you summarize it for us in your own words.”
“Everyone type into the chat your response to [this prompt]. Now, someone pick a response from the chat other than your own and comment on it - how does it affirm or change your own thinking about this?”
If these moves seem unhelpful or inappropriate for your context, it may be the case that you just need to Convey This Info to These People. If that’s so, I vote for recording a Loom of yourself voicing over the slides and emailing that out instead of having everyone watch you read the slides in real time. Then your people can watch it in the best moments of their schedule, read the transcript, and play it back at faster speeds as desired.
-eric
