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I’ve been at the law school for over a year now and we have monthly faculty assemblies outside of the summer months. It has been interesting to see people’s presentation styles in what is the largest regular meeting I attend. It’s an audience of 50 odd people—faculty and staff—and that’s a large audience. I recently had an opportunity to talk about a project I’d been supporting and the meeting was virtual. I knew I would need to be prepared for a variety of outcomes.
Obviously, when you present, you want to be able to share information. Ideally, people receive the information and understand it. It seems normal to me to be interrupted in a presentation by people with questions. Perhaps because we have so many lawyers in the room, it is my assumption that interruptions are more likely than not in a situation like a faculty assembly.
A virtual meeting provides its own challenges because you are trying to juggle a few different things. First, you may have a slide deck like I did. This can obfuscate most of your visual cues, which is very different from an in-person presentation where you may be able to see every participant. Second, virtual meetings often use a variety of synchronous tools. Attendees may raise a hand to ask a question orally or they type a question into chat. It is not unusual to experience a presentation where the presenter’s technology inhibits their ability to interact with the audience.
I have had some practice with this. I was working off of my work laptop which has administratively restricted software capabilities. Normally I might have used something like OBS Studio for more versatility. For a moment I considered using PowerPoint’s Cameo feature but this requires a lot of planning on slide design that I didn’t really want to deal with. This is particularly true in a meeting configuration—where you have all of the participant’s video visible in small blocks—and so your face on a slide may duplicate your meeting box. If I was operating in webinar mode, I think Cameo or OBS Studio would make more sense. In the end, I decided to just prepare for a straight slide deck. I mean, who knows, the agenda might have required alteration and I could have ended up with an in-person slide presentation to deliver.
I did want to make sure I had all available information on the screen. If you are operating off a single screen, this may be impossible with a slide deck. Fortunately, I had two monitors so I could use PowerPoint’s presenter mode for the audience and keep one monitor to myself.
One thing I have noticed is that a lot of people aren’t fluid with virtual meeting software when it comes to sharing a screen. You can usually share a screen or an application on a screen. In general, the latter is better because it allows you to interact with other apps on the same screen without your audience seeing them. I tend to close unused apps (like Microsoft Edge with my email inbox visible) before doing any sort of presentation. That avoids any unintentional disclosure of emails or calendar items or whatnot.
In PowerPoint presenter mode, then, I can share just the slides on my first monitor (seen below on the left) while having full access to the presenter dashboard (on the right). The screen share will only show the slide deck, no additional chrome or apps. Now I had to think about what else I might need to see while I’m presenting and where to put it.
You can see from the illustration above what I ended up with and it worked very well for me. When I was practicing, I had the Zoom Workplace window, seen in green above, at the top. But I realized that it would be better on the bottom because I would not be looking at the Zoom app during the call. Instead, I placed it at the bottom with the screen share output tab visible. This meant I could see if someone raised their hand (the little talking head boxes would move visually, but I could also quickly just drop my eyes down). It also meant that I could see what they were seeing and avoid asking “can you see my slides?” when I knew that they had the same interface I did.
This meant I could put my PowerPoint presenter window at the top. This had two benefits. First, it would mean that I was looking almost directly at my camera, almost like I was using a teleprompter. For people who had my camera view up, they would at least have the feeling of me speaking to them. If I was using Cameo, this is the arrangement I would want to because the camera video should look like you’re talking to your audience, not your keyboard.
I popped the Zoom Workplace chat box up and then out of the Zoom app itself. This meant I could have the chat running the height of the screen. This was less important for the information than to be sure I saw if new chat messages appeared. If I’m looking at my slide deck and camera primarily, a movement in the chat box, just like a hand raised in the Zoom app, would be visible to me.
Lastly, I placed an open web browser window to the far right. It’s barely on the screen but it was just there in an emergency. I opened up a couple of tabs with information that I thought I might need to refer to, including the URL of the scholarship promotion checklist I was discussing. I did not plan to use them but I also wanted to be able to quickly respond to any questions. As I went through my presentation, I considered what someone might ask and tried to be prepared by tailoring my slides, adding notes to my slides, or having a link open.
Anyone else get anxious giving a presentation? Count me in. I practiced it a number of times and iterated the slide deck about 10 times, moving things around, adding and deleting. This was in part because the project wasn’t mine. As the project members worked on it, our communication goals changed and I kept narrowing in on those. More importantly, I practiced it with Zoom open in this configuration (without the chat window). I wanted to practice sharing just the app screen I wanted, and make sure that what attendees saw was what I wanted them to see.
Our spot came up in the agenda and an associate dean gave an introduction to the initiative. As they were talking, I initiated the screen share so that, as soon as they were done, I could start to talk. The agenda was running long and I was a little worried about the time. I find that practicing shorter presentations for timing can be harder than practicing long ones. In a long presentation, you can trim as you go, compressing or expanding as needed. If you have a short presentation, you don’t really have much latitude to cut or add.
Own your time. Unless you know you are going to be quick, don’t say “I’ll be quick” or “I’ll go quickly” or even “I’ll be brief”. I was in a meeting recently where someone said that and we moved on from their topic 30 minutes later. If you have practiced what you are going to say, just go ahead and say it. You have already made decisions to include content and you should not undo those decisions on the fly.
Alternatively, you should be selective and focused on brevity when you are planning your slides. In fact, this is where I think a lot of presentations go awry. They try to cover too much ground and run long, causing both the presenter and audience to experience some discomfort. Worse, the slide decks are replete with dense wording or complicated tables and lose the value of being a presentation tool.
This isn’t all vibes either. We know that people can focus on a concept for about 2 minutes. If you have 10 minutes to speak, you can get in 5 slides at 2 minutes a piece, 10 at 1 minute a piece. Just as this NIH piece recommends, I’d go for 10 / 1. As it also says, focus on 1 idea per slide. If you are staying focused, you can keep your audience focused as well.
When we started developing the slide deck, it was talking about the entire initiative we were working on. After some reflection, I suggested that no one really cared about that. We could tee up the rationale in a minute or so (by the Associate Dean) and then focus on the artifact we’d created, a checklist. In this sense a presentation is no different from writing. If you don’t know what you are trying to talk about, you end up with a lot of old waffle.
I ended up with about 13 slides. Some of them were just rounding the corners. I always use a “thank you” slide for the same reason Salieri critiques Mozart’s opera in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus: “I think you overestimate our dear Viennese, my friend. Do you know you didn’t even give them a good bang at the end of songs to let them know when to clap?” It saves you from an awkward pause and saying, “That’s all!” Also, a “thank you” slide doesn’t count against your time because it’s literally the end.
One of the slides I used was just in case and out of sequence. I was anticipating a question about our faculty activity report site. The site can be set to publicly viewable or kept private, just for reporting for faculty affairs purposes. Some faculty have not seen the public view. I decided I would use an internal bypass link just in case.
I have used this technique before. It allows you to keep slides in your deck that you may never use. I always put them at the end, so, in the screenshot of my PowerPoint slide sorter above, it’s slide 15. On the slides (7 and 12) where I mention the faculty report site, I made a hyperlink. If I were to click on the large red box on those slides, it would take me to slide 15. Once at slide 15, I had two hyperlinks. One took me to slide 7, the other to slide 12. It meant that, if the topic came up, I could jump to a slide out of sequence, return, and finish the original slide deck. The “thank you slide” at #14 meant that I wouldn’t click past it to whatever unsequenced slides existed.
As I was about halfway through my presentation, a chat message popped up. I answered it and moved on. Then a second one popped up as I showed a screen capture of the checklist: could they have a copy? I had already mentioned that I’d email it, after I’d introduced it at the assembly so they knew what it was. But I wondered if someone would want to start to work with it during the assembly so I prepared. I grabbed the URL from the web browser tab and pasted it right into the chat.
I had good feedback about the initiative and about the presentation. That felt good because I felt it was rushed and I didn’t feel as settled as I know I can be. But one nice bit of feedback was someone’s amazement at how quickly I was able to respond to chat, with a link, without really breaking the flow of my spoken presentation. It was only possible with a bunch of planning in advance.
There will be a next time. Whether it’s in person or not, I will use PowerPoint presenter mode. The next time I will turn on subtitles, which I intended to turn on this time but forgot as I made my screen share active. If it’s virtual, I feel as though I have a good starting point for my layout of apps and windows.