How to Make a Professional Looking Presentation for School

Making school presentations can be really stressful. No matter who you are, or what school you go to, a lot rides on creating a high quality product. A lot of school presentations are part of a final product, or something that counts as a large part of your grade. This is what can make it really stressful, since in many cases, creating a good presentation can mean all the difference between passing and failing your class. Not to mention it also means that you need to get up in front of peers and a teacher, all of which are watching your every mood, and probably grading you for your work and delivery. Needless to say, it can be a headache. Here are some tips to help you make and deliver a professional feeling presentation to impress your teachers and peers, and make you more confident in your presentation. 

Keep it simple

One of the most important things to remember throughout your making and delivering process, is that keeping it simple is key. And if you think about it, it really makes a lot of sense why. If your slideshow is littered with scattered images, a bulky or flamboyant theme, or has a lot of words, especially in small text, it really distracts the audience from the presentation itself. In terms of a bulky theme or a lot of images, the audience will be easily distracted by having a lot more to look at. This will pull them away from the presentation itself, and it will be far easier to miss the point, or need to go back and review something. It’s similar when you decide to put every word down on your slide as well. Having a lot of words on the page will give your audience a lot to read. This means that they’ll be more busy reading your slide, than listening to you. This makes for a really boring, and non-engaging presentation experience for the audience, but with talking in the background, a lot of the time people will get mixed up and will need to ask additional questions or re-read. Either way, bad news.

So what can you really do? Especially when your presentation is about something you don’t really know much about, or you have a lot of requirements for how the presentation is organized, and what’s in it. Remember. Keep it simple. It’s far better to have a lot of slides, with less clutter, than a few slides that are packed densely with information. Try to keep each slide to either image or text, and if it’s a visual slide, keep it to one image or graph. If it’s a text slide, keep it to as few words as possible. I’m talking ten or less. Another good thing to do is make sure that you make your fonts large. You want your audience to be able to quickly read and understand whatever is displayed on the slide, so that they can turn their attention towards you and your presentation. This also means to pick an easy font for your text, don’t pick anything fancy. Even little tails or feet on the end of a letter will drastically reduce the readability of a word or sentence, taking away from the presentation experience. So keep it simple, and keep it big. With images, try to pick ones that don’t have a lot going on. Unless the idea is to confuse your audience, you want a picture that you can look at and understand fully in the blink of an eye, so that your audience doesn’t spend the whole time trying to figure out what they’re looking at. Same goes for graphs and statistics, split it up and make each piece easy to see and understand. Do all of the explaining yourself, and use the slides to enforce that. Not the other way around. With google slides and powerpoint templates, it’s the same thing as images. Look around on sites like hislide.io free templates and find a simple, and elegant slide theme that’s right for you. 

Practice

Lastly, is your presentation ability. Practice, practice, and more practice. Make sure that you can comfortably deliver your presentation without any stuttering, and with few connecting words and filler words. You also need to make sure that you’re prepared to answer questions from the audience, even if it’s not something covered in the slides. Learn more about your presentation topic that the bare minimum, and you’ll be able to come as much more understanding of your topic, and you’ll be able to create your presentation far quicker. It’s also good to understand that your slides are your tool, and you aren’t a tool for your slides. Your presentation is a visual aid, but the real presentation is you.