Hosted by Megan Davidson.

Powerpoint presentations can be painful. The often obvious lack of practice and awareness of audience engagement morphs the exercise from public speaking practice to public listening endurance—making it miserable for all parties involved. This is where the PechaKucha presentation style comes in. In 2003 an architectural firm in Japan invented this style of Powerpoint presentation, which puts an emphasis on accessibility of audience over info dumping of the speaker. Speakers have 20 slides of images (limited-to-no text), which they set to auto advance every 20 seconds, resulting in dynamic 6 min and 40 second presentations (that you don’t have to keep time for or cut them off). Rather than attempting to translate their entire research paper into a brief presentation, this style asks speakers to make their work accessible to a lay audience. This style of presentation places value on the “entertainment” quality of public speaking and encourages students to “tell a story” to their audience through the lens of their research. The auto-advancing slides format forces students to spend more time developing and practicing their presentations, and student audiences report they actually enjoyed and learned from their classmates in this style. Student speakers reported that, while more stressful, it was more exciting to prepare for as a performance for the class and practice skills they could directly see benefiting them in future careers. It’s not just students that get something out of this format. Instructors don’t have to spend their time watching the clock or looking for an opportunity to cut off a speaker—the slides take care of it for you! This CTL presentation will include an editable assignment (with rubric) that includes technical directions for how to use this style in Microsoft Powerpoint or Google slides.