1. Presentations and Reports

2. Goal: to Communicate  Both presentations and reports should have a purpose  to inform  to convince  The content should support that purpose

3. Format for communicating  Introduction: Tell the audience what you are going to say  Purpose of talk  Organization  Content: Tell the audience what you want them to know  Conclusions: Tell the audience what you said

4. Before you start writing  Allow yourself time to think about what you want to say  write down any thoughts you have about things you want to say  Do any necessary research in advance  you may need time to follow up on details  Make an outline  Think about who your audience is

5. Presentation Tips  Visual aids should supplement the presentation.  The medium is not the message  Start with ideas  Use visual aids to reinforce them  Limit text in slides  Use slides for pictures and graphs which can't be easily put into words

6. Design Issues  Using PowerPoint does not automatically make your presentation good  Each slide should make a point  Make your slides easy to read

7. Use reasonably big fonts  32 point  28 point  24 point  20 point  16 point  It needs to be readable by everyone in the audience

8. Limit amount of text on slide  Don’t make your bullets too long; the audience won't have time to read the whole thing  Consider handouts for large amounts of text  Short bullets can be read quickly  Everything doesn't have to be on the slide  You can elaborate as you speak  Don't put too many on one slide

9. Use Color Carefully  Contrast  too high is jarring  too low makes it hard to read  Complementary colors

13. Special effects get old fast  This  animation  does not  really  add anything useful  to the presentation

14. Some references  PowerPoint Presentations: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  http://www.shkaminski.com/Classes/Handou ts/powerpoint.htm http://www.shkaminski.com/Classes/Handou ts/powerpoint.htm  Is PowerPoint Evil?  Wired Magazine, September 2003, page 112, 118  Computer July 2004, page 100

15. Reports  You need to write your report in a format suitable for a journal or conference publication  Format for submission to ACM journals  http://www.acm.org/publications/panel/subm ission http://www.acm.org/publications/panel/subm ission  Templates available for LaTex and Microsoft Word

16. laTex  A page formatting language commonly used for scientific papers  Based on Tex which was created by computer scientist Donald Knuth  kile provides a user interface for creating and viewing laTex documents

17. Rubrics  Rubric used to evaluate reports and presentations are in handouts directory  http://cs.boisestate.edu/~tcole/cs498/spr09/ha ndouts/ http://cs.boisestate.edu/~tcole/cs498/spr09/ha ndouts/  We use these rubrics to assess how well students are learning communication skills  This course is being assessed this semester