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Effective Presentations: Discover Flipwit new features for 2018

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Have you ever get bored during a presentation? In reality, It is common for most teachers and speakers to experience lack of attention and poor interaction during their presentations. Beyond the problem of attention, making presentations poses serious challenges related to information exchange, slides management and handling groups under a methodology that is usually passive.   However, slides presentations and especially Powerpoint is very popular, with figures showing a market of 120 million people and about 30 million presentations created every day.

 

Flipwit is developed as a solution for many of the problems previously mentioned.  We apply neuroeducation concepts to find tools that help us to reactivate the attention and provide didactic alternatives during Powerpoint presentations.   Even if we were initially focused on the educative usage of Presentations, our features have transformed Powerpoint in a powerful tool for speakers, entrepreneurs, salesmen and everyone interested in communicating effectively a message through a presentation.

 

The first version of Flipwit let you get access to your presentations from any device, display slides in your audience devices and interact with them through polls and quizzes.  In addition, it allows you to control and browse slides from your mobile, manage the time during the presentations and include web content on your slides. These tools boost your presentations, show you like someone innovative and convincing and also promotes the participation and enhance learning.   The interaction gained using Flipwit besides of reactivating the attention, it allows you to collect information that can be useful to explore the preferences of your customers and students adapting your presentations to their needs.

 

 

Despite offering all these benefits, our effort for improving the possibilities with Powerpoint goes beyond.  We are currently developing new features to make your presentations reach a new level….

 

Through the new features, you can send automatically documents to your audience, save the answers to your polls, get attendance lists automatically, include youtube videos in your presentations and use the software offline.  These tools let you save time when you share documents or promotional material, ease evaluation and tracking to students and clients and also let you use all the Flipwit tools in places without an internet connection.

 

As you can see, we have included tools to simplify the management of your presentations and give you communication alternatives.  In addition, our tools include emotion and social interaction during your presentations. These benefits enhance learning and information recalling making your audience enjoy while they receive the information you want to share.

 

What are you waiting to improve your presentations? If you are not a FLIPWIT registered user we invite you to get a FREE TRIAL.

 

Effective communication- How to convey a message effectively

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Effective communications is a cross-cutting need; no matter if we are educators looking for alluring our students or entrepreneurs trying to convince an investor about the benefits of our product. This kind of communication aims to get a point across causing an effect on the receiver; however is not an abundant skill nowadays.

So, educators, entrepreneurs, salesmen and everyone with the objective of persuading or conveying a message will benefit applying the following rules developed by Frank Lantz.

If you want to apply these rules in your presentations, explore FLIPWIT and try it for FREE.

1. Simplicity: Simple messages cause a bigger impact.   So, if you want to be remembered, leave behind technical language and empty words.

2.  Be brief: Remember that less is often more. The attention span of our brains is limited and our audience could not be motivated. So, forget about neverending speeches and try instead to use a limited number of words that could phrase your message with precision.

3. Credibility: Confusing messages will cause doubts about the veracity of your message activating a defensive response in your audience. People just consider genuine information.   So, making your message genuine and avoiding contradictions will gain the credibility of your public and ease the communication.

 4. Coherence: Even if you want to try several topics, our attention is limited and the working memory will filter most of the information. The recommendation is to focus on few elements that should be recalled through repetition

5. Memorable words: The brain has an aesthetic sense which is attracted by elements such as symmetry and rhythm. In terms of speech, using rhymes and sets of words with similar endings or some musicality will make our message be remembered.

6. Novelty: Our brain is trained to detect and get motivated by innovative elements. In this case, surprising our audience with unknown information or data;   will help them to make sense of our message and remember.

 7.Positive messages: We naturally prefer happy endings.   So, connecting the message with emotions and transmitting hope will help your audience to accept the message and remember.

8.Visualization: The brain works building networks. Therefore, if our messages can trigger mental images; it will be easier for our audience to remember and recalling such memories in the future.

9. Using questions: Questioning your audience will help them to feel included. In addition, the mental effort of processing the answer will make them get connected to the topic and help them to remember.

10.Context: Our emotional brain needs to make sense of information in order to get motivated.   That is the reason why your audience should know the importance of the message and how it is related to their needs and ambitions.

Check out this course: Storytelling Tactics to Make Exciting Speeches

Effective presentations. How to avoid Death by Powerpoint?

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No matter if we are students, educators, entrepreneurs or salesmen, we are all familiar with Powerpoint. During two decades, this piece of software from the Microsoft Office family has been the most used tool to present our academic and commercial ideas.

Nevertheless, our presentations are not always as effective as we expect and sometimes we can even trigger in our audience what is called Death by Powerpoint. What is the source of this problem? Is it always difficult to convey a message to our audience? The answer is simple: We have not a properly designed presentation!   We just need to apply some basic rules to improve the effectiveness of our message!

The following are some basic principles to avoid the Dead by Powerpoint.

 

If you want to boost your presentations, explore all the possibilities with FLIPWIT and try it for FREE

 

 

 

1.  Write a script: Planning is important, so before using Powerpoint define the message you want to convey. The human brain is designed to remember stories and no matter, if you are having an academic speech or an elevator pitch; creating a timeline and including the elements of a story, will help us to make it memorable.

 

2.  Don´t write paragraphs: Even if you want to show all your knowledge, slides are schematic tools, not documents. Your audience can either listen or read, so if you want to catch the attention of the participants, you must reduce the text in your slides.

 

3.  Be brief: No matter the length of the session, a presentation must be as short and precise as possible.   The average attention span is 20 minutes, and our working memory has a limited size. So, if you want an effective presentation, the less is often more. If 20 minutes is not enough include active pauses and allow your audience´s brain and eyes to get a rest.

 

4.  Don´t dismiss the style: Design is one of the most important elements if you want to catch the attention and be remembered.   Using animations, shadows and overloading your presentation with visual elements is a cause of distraction and could make you look unprofessional. Be careful choosing colors and fonts and use images to stand out your message.

 

5.  Avoid templates: After two decades of using Powerpoint, its templates can be boring and overused. Many of those templates are overloaded with text and their choice of colors and fonts are not the most appropiated.

 

6.  Be wise with bullets: Even if your presentation includes many topics, is not convenient to show them all on a single slide. A long list can overwhelm your audience, so you can distribute your bullets and topics in different slides and use images to avoid being boring.

 

7.  Include questions: Questions give you the chance of interacting with your audience and break the monotony. Including questions can also show that you are concern about your audience perspective. On the other side, the intellectual effort of recalling the answer improves the retention of the message that you want to convey.

¿What is the secret to be a good teacher?

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As a teacher everyone have the need of feeling that is making a great job and that is changing lives; nevertheless we also know that is not easy to come to that point.   Your knowledge of pedagogy, charm and vocation are essential assets, but is also true that experience is the main factor to refine us as teachers and get connected with our students or audiences.

Experience give us the chance to learn through trial and error that you should “gain” the trust of your class to get the best results and also which elements could motivate and which ones could distract. However, all the groups are different making even more difficult to find the right strategies to foster a learning environment. Considering that is not easy to find and combine all the elements to be successful, you need passion to be a teacher and overcome all the challenges that this profession poses.

The new educational trends bring new challenges and opportunities to improve our performance, even if it is not easy to adapt us to the requirements that these methodologies bring. That is why is important to cultivate habits that ease our tasks and also incorporate technologies and strategies to facilitate the process.

On this post we share an infographic with 10 habits that could help to improve our performance; and also bring the human and emotional dimension to teaching.

We hope you find it useful and we welcome any further ideas for publication in a future issue.

 

 

 

 

 

Why Flipwit?

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Several educational institutions nowadays try to foster understanding without considering how the brain learns.   Average attention span on humans is not longer than 20 minutes in a passive way.   In addition, there is scientific evidence of  the role of emotions in learning.   So, is it essential to cast boredom from classrooms to improve learning.   These two factors have serious consequences on the academic level of institutions and countries. For instance, we can analyse the results of the global education survey by the  OCDE (Program for international student Assessment , PISA).  The program is testing every three years the performance of 15 year olds in key areas, showing which countries have reached a good performance and the ones that still have a long way to reach excellence.

The global survey also analyzes several educational  indicators, including motivation for learning, self awareness and learning strategies.  The results show that in most cases low performance is caused by poor  instructional models which  are related with  lack of motivation and liable to harm the academic development.

Flipwit consider to tackle this situation from a innovate approach, through interactive tools that improve the collaboration and retention of information in the classroom. Flipwit aim to improve the learning process through the interaction of teachers and students and the use of educational games in real time from their mobile devices (mobile phones, tablets and laptops) to bring emotion to the education of people.

Our software intends  to bring energy to presentations not just in classrooms but also in any educational situation.  Considering that  an adult attention span is about 15 and 20 minutes, it is essential to create interaction to  foster communication and transmit the gross of the message.  Flipwit  includes that property, allowing students to participate in real time through interactive games  which keep them focus  and generate dynamic debates and the participation of the whole class.

In addition, a study  related with the use of answering systems [3], have shown their benefits making  students  to enjoy the classes and be more connected to the contents. Furthermore,  there is scientific evidence   [4]  of  emotion being essential during the learning process; pointing out that  topics that stand out from the media and generate emotions can be more easily retained and consequently learned.  So, fostering interaction with students through an application have an substantial  potential as a mean to include emotion in learning.

In that sense, Flipwit gives the lecturer the chance to add interaction and trigger emotions through different games and integrated tools;  making our software the first  application on the market to innovate with this kind of features applied to learning.

Connecting technology and education not only  improves scope but also set a milestone in learning; because it tackles the student individual needs through personalization and interaction.  It creates a new framework, fostering collaborative learning and mostly offering a creative and flexible methodology which get closer to diversity and the real educational needs of individuals [5].

[1] PISA, B. (2017). Buenas y malas noticias para Colombia en pruebas PISA | ELESPECTADOR.COM. [online] ELESPECTADOR.COM. Available at: http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/educacion/buenas-y-malas-noticias-colombia-pruebas-pisa-articulo-669148.

[2] http://citl.indiana.edu/files/pdf/middendorf_kalish_1996.pdf

[3] https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/32/papers/8854/download

[4] https://autoconocimientointegral.com/2015/07/04/la-neurociencia-demuestra-que-el-elemento-esencial-en-el-aprendizaje-es-la-emocion/

[5] http://www.iseamcc.net/eISEA/Vigilancia_tecnologica/informe_4.pdf.