Friday 23 September 2016

Come on baby, light my fire!

The purpose of an ignite talk is to enlighten your audience, but doing so quickly! In an ignite presentation, Presenters get 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds. The result is a fast and fun presentation which lasts just 5 minutes.

Me, standing by, as a video plays as part of my ignite presentation

Today the MDTA cohort were given the challenge of creating an ignite talk about a given topic. (When I say given, I mean drawn out of a basket a few hours before presenting!). There was one extra topic that could be chosen, had someone wanted to swap what they received - that person ended up being me and my topic changed to Carol Dweck's revisiting of the 'Growth Mindset'. I felt the actual presentation was a nightmare, with my preparation not feeling complete, my slides not automatically advancing despite my tinkering with the settings, and of course, me having WAY too many words to each slide, meaning I fell behind and what I was saying did not match with what was on the screen! Ah! It makes me cringe just thinking about it. Obviously this was a great learning experience and if I ever had to curate a quality ignite talk within a few hours again, I would focus on getting the technical parts working at the beginning, a word to represent each slide, and a script that was finely timed with the moving of the slides, rather than the aesthetics of each slide!

Below is not my live ignite presentation, but rather a recording of my presentation with some audio on top. If you would like to see how to do this, see this YouTube video!


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