Chapter 2 Reflections: They Snooze You Lose by Lynell Burmark

I can’t tell you how many presentations I have been to and said, “They could have just emailed me the PowerPoint and saved me the whole day of sitting here bored out of my mind!” I do despise trainings where the presenter reads verbatim from the slides for 6 hours. What an eye opener about the three parts of a presentation having separate jobs but working together to “create” the show. The author gives a great thought provoking statement when she says, “The solution—the last-ditch attempt at fixing boring slideshows—is to recognize that the problem is not the three aspects of a presentation themselves
1. Slides
2. Handouts
3. Presenter
The problem comes from making them redundant rather than complementary or synergistic”(Burmark, 2011). The dual channels of learning: visual followed by auditory was an interesting concept to think about when designing a presentation. What I understood to be the key concept for a presentation is give them a graphic to be thinking about, then throw some text at them and let the audience make their own connections to their learning.
She made a great point about losing the audience to their gadgets. I must confess I am very guilty of that transgression, but maybe if the presenter designed their presentation with these points in mind I would have been more in tune.
Needless to say, when I grow up, I want to make presentations just like Dr. Burmark!!

References
Burmark, Lynell (2011-06-28). They Snooze, You Lose: The Educator's Guide to Successful Presentations (Kindle Locations 788-792 & 793-794). John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.