Guidelines for Presentations in INX 199

Each presentation should last 15-16 minutes.  

  You will not be allowed to go over 16 minutes, so PRACTICE.  Even
  people who give lots and lots of presentations still need to
  practice to get the timing right.  Make sure you practive OUT LOUD,
  preferably to an audience, but if you don't have a willing friend or
  two to listen to you, say it out loud, standing up, anyway.  

  Don't think you've practiced if you've just gone through your slides
  thinking of what you'll say, or even saying it in your head.  You
  really need to say it aloud, multiple times, to make sure you'll be
  comfortable in front of the class.  It helps to have an audience
  (even of one person!) -- some people speed up in front of an
  audience, and some slow down -- it's best to find this out about
  yourself before you're in front of the class.

Each presentation will be followed by a 5-7 minute question period.

  I will ask questions of the presenter, but afterward, people in the
  class will be given the opportunity to ask questions.  You don't
  need (and there wouldn't be time for you to) ask questions after
  every presentation.  But, asking questions is part of your
  participation mark in the class, so try to ask a question during
  each class.

You may present using your own laptop, if you have one.  The default
is that you present using mine.

  If you plan to use my laptop, you must send me a draft of your
  presentation by email no later than Friday at 10am, the week before
  your presentation date.  This does not have to be a complete
  presentation!  But I need to make sure your formatting shows up
  correctly on my laptop, in time for you to make adjustments if it
  does not.  (Of course, you are welcome to send a draft earlier for
  me to check!)

  Again, if you plan to use my laptop, you must send me your FINAL
  presentation no later than 10am Tuesday, the day before your
  presentation, so that I can load everyone's presentation, and make
  sure everything is set to go.

  If you plan to use your own laptop, you should bring your laptop to
  class the week before your presentation (or earlier) so that we can
  make sure that your laptop can make a successful connection to my
  projector.  If your presentation is Mar 8 (the first presentation
  day), then you should bring your laptop to my office hours on Mar 1
  to test it out.

As a ROUGH guideline, a 15-minute presentation generally would have
somewhere between about 8 and 18 slides.  (If it were me, I would have
about 12-15, just to give you an idea.)

  How many slides you have depends on how much you put on them (try
  very hard to not overcrowd your slides!), and also how much you talk
  about each slide (eg, maybe you don't have much text, but you have a
  graph that you have to explain that takes a few minutes; conversely,
  maybe you have several slides that are very simple pictures or
  graphics that you only show for 20-30 seconds each).

  You can't possibly fit all the material from a 12-page term paper
  into a 15-minute presentation, so choose your presentation material
  carefully.  You'll need a title slide, an intro slide that gives
  your thesis or perhaps a high level view of your topic, some number
  of content slides, and then a conclusion.  

  A good place to start is with your term paper outline.  Use that to
  decide what are the most important subtopics.  Pick the things that
  are most interesting to you!  Those will be the ones you communicate
  most enthusiastically and effectively.

  Make sure you use some pictures and/or graphs/diagrams.  Animation
  is fun, but when it's overdone, it's irritating -- remember that
  watching bullet points fly in for 4 different presentations in one
  class will start to get really old. :-) Use animation to reveal
  bullet points successively that you don't want the audience to see
  all at once, or to direct attention over time to different parts of
  an image or diagram, etc.

Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions!