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Progress Report |
Below are presentation assignment dates for everyone in class. If you are unable to present on the day to which you have been assigned, please let me know as soon as possible. Presentations will take place over three class periods in our classroom.
For this assignment, you will be presenting a 5-8 minute progress report to the entire class using Microsoft PowerPoint. The subject of this progress report will be the topic you chose for your final project. In this progress report, you will be informing the class how much work you have done so far on your final report -- due during our final exam period and on the same subject as your proposal -- and how much work remains to be done before this final due date. A timeline for finishing work on this final report would be helpful.
Before preparing your presentation, make sure that you have read Chapter 18 on Oral Presentations, which deals with three type of presentations, one of which is informal presentations. This is the kind you will be presenting in class.
In addition to the PowerPoint presentation, you should also bring at least 15 hand-out copies of your presentation slides for students to share. To save paper, use the print options in PowerPoint to print 3-slides-per-page handout sheets.
During our in-class PowerPoint workshop, we will discuss the need to integrate both text and visuals to convey your ideas to an audience. Depending on how many graphic images you use, the total file size for these PowerPoint presentations will become larger than the 1.3 MB maximum storage space of a standard 3.5" floppy disk.
If this becomes the case with your presentation, you will need to find some other way of storing the PowerPoint file, either splitting it up over several floppies or using a Zip disk. You will be responsible for managing these files and ensuring that they are placed in the dropbox by 11:00 am on Thursday, April 5th.
One way to reduce the amount of storage space needed for your final presentation is to make sure the graphic images you use have a resolution of 72 dpi or less (dpi stands for dots per inch). This is the highest resolution that a computer monitor can project, and since you will be making these reports using PowerPoint, that is the highest resolution you need.
Since most of you aren't graphic artists, you will need to use clip art or Web images to give your presentations visual appeal. PowerPoint comes with a host of clip art, but since these are used quite often, I would encourage you to explore alternative sources of images. One of these is the list of clip art sites I put together for the class web site earlier in the semester:
http://eserver.org/314/visual.html
An additional source of images is the Web itself. Many of the popular search engines on the Web have techniques for locating certain graphic images. For example, the AltaVista search engine allows you to search for images of Elvis by typing in the following:
image:elvis
After a few seconds, a list of sites containing image files with the word "elvis" in them will be posted in the browser window. Once you go to these sites, you can download the image file by simply clicking and holding your cursor on the image and then saving it using the "Save This Image As..." command. The image will be in either GIF or JPEG format, but Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac will translate it into a PICT image, while PowerPoint for Windows will use these formats.
NOTE: As I mentioned in class, you should avoid excessive and gratuitous use of visual images in your presentation. Make sure the images reinforce the concepts you are discussing. A good rule of thumb is to have a graphic image on every third slide to maintain audience interest, but make sure the image relates to the points being made. Remember, you can also use graphs and charts from other Microsoft programs, such as Word and Excel, to make certain points during your presentation. If you need to make reference to a Web site, we will also have access to the Internet during the presentations.
The organization of your presentation should follow the general format of a generic report, including a summary of your talk at the beginning and a conclusion at the end. What you do in the middle is entirely up to you, but you should make sure your presentation follows a logical outline that conveys your progress and future plans to the audience.
As I mentioned in class last week, the criteria on which you will be evaluated consists of mainly two components -- how well you have organized and visually displayed your progress report within the PowerPoint environment, and how well you present this information to the audience. Presentation criteria include such things as making eye contact with your audience, maintaining interest in the subject matter, and effectively navigating the PowerPoint environment.
This assignment counts for 15% of your semester grade, so make sure you spend time putting together a logically organized and visually appealing presentation.
If you have any questions, please let me know in class or by email.
| Geoffrey Sauer (gsauer@iastate.edu) - 25 August 2003 |