Presenting your research work or weekly progress to a large audience or your supervisor is an important skill to learn. Google slides (googleslides) have been a go-to for delivering a technical presentation nowadays.
This article will cover a step-by-step method that I use to prepare the first draft of my technical presentations in a short time.
It is then followed by a more time-consuming process where we need:
To reorganize content to match our storyline, the key takeaway I want the audience to have after listening to my presentation and how much time to spend on each slide so that I can finish within the time limit.
Preparing effective technical presentations in a limited time
It might feel like a daunting task if it is your first time or you have little time to finish the job.
Parallel to this, I also cover the different steps in writing a paper (Part 1) to prepare for paper submission in a conference or workshop (Part 2).
In the first 20 minutes of my Youtube video, I cover in-depth on how to deliver technical talks in academia
Quick presentation preparation steps to follow
I have found following the below steps towards preparing an effective presentation. I have also made some of my technical presentations available for direct reference in another article where I made the presentation slides available on my Github repository.
Step 1 of preparing technical presentation using Google Slides
Follow the template of the paper at hand and transform it into a presentation format as fast as possible. You deal with each section independently and summarise it point-wise, highlighting the major, broad points. This takes care of 80% of the content of your final presentation without much mental work.
Research presentation template : Motivation – Related Works – Proposed Method – Dataset – Results – Conclusion – Future Work – References
Step 2
One piece of advice I repeatedly got was to arrange the presentation in a storyline format. You should go through this article to get a rough idea of what I mean. There is no fixed step-by-step technique that I can lay down, but some points to keep in mind.
- Within the first 2 minutes of the presentation, the audience should clearly understand the paper’s motivation and key novel contributions.
- After describing the problem setting, I suggest explaining it using an example. This can be a way to support the motivation of the paper.
- If the methodology is quite long or complex, it is a good idea to use a flowchart to give an idea of how the different individual sections fit into the overall system. This helps the audience better understand each section’s utility and methodology.
Other important references
You can also check out the following relevant resources :
- How to give a dynamic scientific presentation by Elsevier
- Tips for a research presentation by ECE@UMD
- Ways to give an effective seminar about your research project by Nature Careers Community
Final thoughts on technical presentation examples using googleslides
We hope the above slides gave a more practical perspective on preparing academic and technical presentations. However, these learnings, in principle, should also help you to deliver technical talks in the industry or your workplace.
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