For all those reasons, I wanted to play some clips in a couple of talks I gave lately. But I was at first put off by all the ads that tend to show up on YouTube clips.
In this post, you’ll see a quick way around the ads, without violating the terms of service by downloading the video or using an ad-blocker.
To learn more, you can click any of these headings – or, just scroll down:
When you present online, the tips below will help set you up for success. They come from my friend Eric Winters, who’s a coach, author, and international public speaker.
I love the metaphor Eric uses to explain why it’s hard work watching an online talk:
“There’s a good reason they call it paying attention,
because you have to give up a lot of energy…
So if we want to help our audiences…
we need to lower the price
of paying attention” Eric Winters – at 1:42 in the video
In his video below, Eric presents what he calls “8½ tips” to elevate your online presentations. The clip’s about 30 minutes long, and he spends about 2-3 minutes discussing each tip.
Below the video, you’ll also find:
a list of the tips
discussion of each one
useful links to help you build your skills.
The video
As I think you’ll see – and as Eric’s live audience commented – this is a very engaging and helpful session:
The tips
Here are Eric’s 8½ tips – click any of them to jump to the relevant part of my post: Continue reading →
If you use Articulate Storyline, you may well have used photographic characters, which let you insert a headshot or other cut-out photo of a person:
Even if you use PowerPoint, you might’ve inserted a very similar portrait photo with no background, as they’re available from many suppliers (like Elearning Art, Elearning Brothers, and Articulate Global itself).
This 2½-minute video shows you a quick, built-in way to give a photo like that a realistic background, so it looks like it was taken in an office.
Do you use a slide that introduces you as a speaker? (That is, with your name, contact details such as your company logo or Twitter handle, and often your photo on it.)
There are certainly good reasons to use that sort of slide:
When you’re presenting online, if people can’t see you, having a slide with your photo on it helps people engage with you and your message.
Even in a big in-person venue (with no video feed showing your face), putting your photo on a slide not only helps people engage, it also helps them approach you after you’ve left the stage.
I’m betting that if you do use that sort of slide, it looks a bit like the typical example below. (If it looks quite different, I’d love to hear from you in the comment box below or via @RemotePoss on Twitter.)
If your speaker slide does look like that, this post and a later one will help you make it look far better:
In this post, you’ll see the changes that could make your slide look much more professionally designed, so you leave the best impression on your audience.
And if you are, you’re right – it’s not so bad. Yet it could be a lot better.
Let me show you what I mean, and then you be the judge. (Or, try out some of the tips in this post, and then let your audiences’ feedback be the judge!)
You’ll find the following topics covered in this post:
Do you want to highlight part of a photo or screenshot (or other picture) as though you’ve shone a spotlight on it? In this post, you’ll see just how to do that, with the 2nd in a short series of videos on using PowerPoint’s slide background fill option.
If you use either Articulate Storyline or PowerPoint, you might find this video handy. It shows you how to easily rotate an object around any point, not just its centre. So you could find this tip useful if your slides have things like meter needles, clock hands, or levers on them.
You can use the tip either to:
Control the angle of objects when you place them on your slide.
Animate objects to spin around a chosen point when people view the slide.
I was inspired to make the video after watching fab tutorials by David Anderson of Articulate. In his 9 videos (totalling 45 minutes), you’ll see all the details you need to show quiz results on a dial.
The 5th video in David’s series fascinated me
I’m new to Storyline, having developed just one course with it so far, and am learning how its states feature works. So the 5th video in David’s series fascinated me, because it uses states to show the learner’s score.
It can be tricky to place the meter needle at a certain angle though, because when you rotate any object, by default Storyline and PowerPoint rotate it around its centre. So then you have to put the needle’s end back to where you want it, which can be quite fiddly.
Using the tip in the 7-minute video below, the meter rotates around its end, so you don’t have to struggle to put it back.
(If you’d like to make the video bigger, you can click the Full screen symbol below the right end of the video’s timeline.)
Want to make your humble slides look like you used Flash, Photoshop, or another fancy (and pricey!) Adobe tool – when you only used PowerPoint? Well here are some videos to help you do just that.
In 2013, the Duarte blog featured an animation of objects emerging from behind a line, as though rising over the horizon. And in a great 12-minute video tutorial, last month Nick Smith of AdvanceYourSlides.com showed how you can use that same effect on your own slides.
To extend Nick’s method, the 4-minute video below shows how you can reuse the effect on any slide, without having to customise it each time:
Here’s a 3-minue video showing how you can highlight text in yellow in PowerPoint (while you’re designing your slides, rather than just when you present) – much like you can with text in Word.
This method has the advantage that if you move or copy the text you highlighted, the highlight stays with the text. (You might have seen people suggest workarounds like putting a yellow shape behind the text, but if you do that it doesn’t move with the text of course.)
Imagine you’re presenting, and one of these 2 situations comes up:
You want to tell a story.
Someone asks a great question, and it’s only loosely related to what’s on your slide.
In either case, you’re left with this glaring issue:
What do you do with your current slide?
Leaving it on your screen amounts to “blur” (that is, a visual distraction), so that’s not a good option.
You might be thinking:
“A-ha! I know about the PowerPoint shortcut
that lets me black out my current slide!”
Or:
“My remote clicker has a button for
blacking out my slide”
Well in this post, as well as the standard solution provided by PowerPoint (and many remotes), you’ll find at least 3 completely new and better ways to hide your slide. Continue reading →