Paramedic, EMS educator, graphic designer, photographer, and my good friend Kyle Bates shares some tips for new EMS instructors about making presentations and keeping PowerPoint slides simple and useful to the audience.

In a much older video I share 5 essential PowerPoint skills for EMS educators

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EMS and Law Enforcement educator John Dillon has started a new website and training program, VisualBroccoli.com. Part of his training is to makeover PPT programs. In this video John describes several essential PowerPoint skills:

1) Replace text with images

2) The total number of slides is irrelevant to the audience

3) Consistently apply slide layout features

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A few weeks ago I received my evaluations from participants in my two sessions at EMS World Expo 2011. I presented two sessions:

• Trends in Online Emergency Responder Education (view the slides)
• Using Social Media to Market your EMS Agency (view the slides)

EMS World Expo 2011

The evaluation scores and comments are about what I expected. I thought I would share the responses to the question “Are there any sessions or topics you would like to see added for for future events?” as this might inspire you to submit for EMS World Expo 2012 in New Orleans, LA.

Trends in Online Emergency Responder Education attendees wrote:

• Is online training good for your department?
• How to develop an online training session (framework)
• Would like to see a session that actually teaches you/works with student on how to use technology of online EMS education. Tools, tricks, etc.
• More classes on e-learning (all aspects: CE, initial, etc.)
• More EMS Leadership training
• Empact provider course

Using Social Media to Market your EMS Agency attendees wrote:

• How to build your social media presence from scratch
• Hands-on class about how to set up, upload and tag photos
• More social media sessions
• More social media usage topics

Read related posts and tips:

1. Social Media Presentation from EMS World Expo #EMSExpo These are my slides from a presentation I gave last...
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I recently presented at the Ohio Society of Fire Service Instructors Symposium in Columbus, Ohio. My three presentations were:

• Trends in Online Education for Emergency Responders
• Creating Social Media Content for Fire and EMS Education
• Learning Management Systems for Small Fire Departments

John Dillon from C3Softworks helped me integrate audience polling into my PowerPoint presentations. I also deployed a Jeopardy style game using Bravo with virtual audience response pads using a really cool product called Ping. I plan to do more audience polling and game based teaching in future presentations.

You can view my slides from the Learning Management Systems for Small Fire Departments presentation.

I frequently speak at national and regional Fire and EMS conferences about elearning, social media, and learning management systems. My audiences are usually agency leaders and educators with more than 10 years of experience. Inquire about my topics and availability to speak in your event’s leadership or educator track by emailing me at greg at gregfriese dot com. 

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I also write posts frequently at Blog.CentreLearn.com, the blog of CentreLearn Solutions, LLC where I am the director of education. A few of my favorites from September on the CentreLearn blog:

New online training courses for EMTs, Paramedics, and Firefighters

Kinds words from the Epilepsy Foundation

CentreLearn Morning Mug and PowerPoint Design Tips

Test Security Features in the CentreLearn learning management system

The EMSEduCast – the podcast by and for EMS educators – posted several new episodes in September including two episodes recorded at EMS World Expo. On the EMSEduCast I am joined by co-hosts Rob Theriault and Bill Toon. Check out these recent episodes:

Understanding the Power of Words when setting expectations and achieving goals

Updating education programs and test items to the AHA 2010 ECC guidelines and the new EMS Scope of Practice model

Episode 113 and Episode 114 from EMS World Expo 2011

It has been a quiet couple of months at the Medical Author Chat podcast. I haven’t done a new episode since July. Time to round up some authors and record some new episodes.

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Before EMS World Expo I shared a bunch of presentation and PowerPoint tips. After presenting Online Education Trends for Emergency Responders and Using Social Media to Market Your EMS Agency last Thursday I have a few more to add to the list.

1. Arrive early. I heard that the Wednesday morning presenters arrived in their rooms to discover the digital projectors had not yet been delivered.

2. Delete slides during your final preparation. In the final 24 hours before my presentations I removed 6 to 10 slides from each presentation. This tightened the message and ensured I was within the time available (1 hour, 15 minutes).

3. Roll with the tech made available. It has been several years since I have presented without a wireless lavlier microphone so I was pretty surprised to see the lavlier microphone was a wired microphone. The cord was plenty long enough, but it took a bit to figure out how to manage the cord. I looped the cord over my pinky finger in the hand I was using to hold my presentation remote.

4. Connect with audience personally before the presentation. I like to quickly set-up and then wander around getting to know attendees. Some things I learned – it is possible to buy Siberian Huskies while living in Saudi Arabi and Notre Dame football is turning around (this was before their weekend loss).

5. Share some of your passions and interests with the audience during your introduction. I presented on the day the Wisconsin Badgers started their football season and one week before the Packers kick-off the NFL season. Because the Badger game began as my second presentation began I asked the audience to indicate Wisconsin Touchdown by raising their arms in the touchdown signal and then to make a W by putting their arms out at a 45 degree angle. I was tickled to receive three touchdown notifications during the presentation.

6. Upload your slides to Slideshare.com before your presentation. Even though the audience is likely to photograph your slides (see example from the Social Medic) it is reassuring to many in the audience they can view your slides later. I also embedded the slides into blog posts to publish just as my presentation began.

7. Always end on time.

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1. Presentation Tips for EMS World Expo #EMSWorldExpo I was asked by a first-time EMS World Expo presenter...
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Slides from my 2011 EMS World Expo presentation, Trends in Online Emergency Responder Education.

If you are interested in having me present this or other topics at your conference please contact me.

Read related posts and tips:

1. Video: Trends in Online Education for Emergency Responders In this video I describe discusses emerging trends in elearning....
2. Slides: Using Social Media to Market Your EMS Agency #EMSWorldExpo Slides from my 2011 EMS World Expo presentation, Using Social...
3. EMS World 2012 Presentation Ideas A few weeks ago I received my evaluations from participants...

I was asked by a first-time EMS World Expo presenter for presentation tips.

At EMS World I invariably have found myself in a massive room with 400 seats which dwarfs the size of the audience for my niche topic presentations. Usually my room is bordered by Steve Berry and Ken Bouvier and their audience is lined up in the hall trying to find the seats. Instead of worrying about how many people are in my room I reassure myself with these thoughts: 1) EMS World wanted me to present because they believed my topics would be of interest to some attendees. 2) The people in the room are interested and I have a chance to give them ideas, resources, and inspiration to help them as an EMS professional.

Presentation Tips

1. Arrive early so you can set-up your computer, connect to the projector, and put on your lavalier microphone

2. Use the microphone. Even if the size of the audience is small the room is large.

3. Before you start work the room to find out why people chose the session, what they are hoping to learn, and what questions they hope to get answered. Ask their name and organization and if you can work that into the presentation.

4. Move around the room as you present. The podium is usually very far from the audience. Get closer to the audience by moving around the room as you present.

5. Ask “What questions do you have?” and count silently in your head as attendees compose the question they want to ask.

6. When someone leaves the room re-focus on delivering outstanding content to the people in the room. There are lots of reasons people leave a session. I would rather be focused on the people in the room instead of being distracted and worried about the people that leave.

7. Bring your own Wireless Presentation Remote (Amazon affiliate link) for advancing slides.

PowerPoint Slides

1. Use slides to support your presentation with keywords, images, or animations that help reinforce your important points.

2. The number of slides isn’t important. The quality of the information on the slides is important.

3. Increasingly attendees are photographing slides instead of asking for a copy of your slide deck. Use a large font, a text color that contrasts with the background, and move to the side to allow a decent photograph.

4. Invite attendees to connect with you after the session while still at the conference and after on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.

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Create a moving spotlight of a specific part of a PowerPoint slide by setting a transparent color and applying a motion path.

This is the screencast that shows how to create the object with the transparent color to make the spotlight.

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My production process to create online education for emergency responders uses these tools:

• Basecamp from 37signals.com for project management
• PowerPoint for lesson storyboarding, narration writing, slide design, and slide animation
• Articulate Engage to develop custom flash interactions for lessons
• Audacity for recording a .wav of the audio narration
• Nikon D50 camera for custom photography
• Flip Video Ultra Camcorder for custom videography
• Gimp for image enhacement
• Articulate Presenter to convert the PowerPoint file to a SCORM compliant Flash movie that is played in the CentreLearn LMS

This combination of simple tools is used by subject matter experts (SMEs) to develop new lessons on topics of interest to emergency responders or to convert existing classroom content for online delivery.

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