BONUS: List of Presentation Websites and Software

Here is a list of tools and sites I frequently use to make my presentations or might inspire you to stretch beyond your boundaries and increase your skill set.  Check out the companion piece How to Give a Great Medical Presentation 2010.

Advice:

• Duarte Blog: Nancy Duarte, writer of the book Slide:ology, who helped create the look (not the data) for An Inconceivable Truth.  Great tips about slides and hot to make your talk memorable.
• Six Minutes: Blog with links and best of features from all the best public speaking blogs.  Covers preparing, making slides, and presenting.  ****Highly rec: Weekly Best of Blogosphere.****
• Presentation Zen: The Art of the Slide.  Lots of ideas for making your talk inspiring and memorable.

• Slideshare: You can store your presentation files for public or private use.  PPT, DOC, PDF, whatever.  You can even add mp3/audio and make a SlideCast.  Good site to also check if other people have posted on your topic.  See my presentations on Slideshare.  I also post my handouts here.  You can then give your audience the links to your account or the talk so they can always look it up wherever they are.
• Scribd: Similar to Slideshare but focused more on documents.  Just pick one, not both.
• YouTube: You would be surprised how many presentations are on here.  Not just some 3 year old explaining the plot of Star Wars.  Also good to find entertaining things tangential to your talk that you could pull in to your talk.

• PowerPoint: Duh.
• Delicious: A bookmarking service that is independent of any computer you are on.  So when I prepare for a talk, I can add any website that may be relevant to my Delicious account, tag it with labels, and then it is easily searchable (public or private, you choose.)  Check out my account for ideas on how I use it.  Also a good search engine to see what people are linking too.
• Twitter: I use it to search for keywords for my talk to see what others are saying about it.  Try it necxt time and you may find some things that get included in your talk.
• Screenr: A web-based, free tool that records your screen.  Great for explaining a website or 'how-to.'
• Prezi: A cool new idea in making presentations that makes kinetic typography more accessible.  I have been playing around with this and I am just waiting for the right talk to use it on. Animoto is another site that offers similar features.

• MWSnap: (Free) Clipping software to make a jpg of anything on your computer screen. ****Highly recommended****

• Keynote: Duh.
• Graph Click: A cool program which helps you transform that dusty old graph from the 1982 article that has been copied a million times into something legible and that fits with your theme.  You can basically grab all the datapoints from a graph with a few clicks.  Clever.

• Flickr: Great site to find Creative Commons licensed photographs on ANY subject you could think of.  32k+ images tagged with 'hospice'!! Make sure you use advanced search and check the appropriate Creative Commons boxes at the bottom. Maybe even leave a comment for the creator of the photo.  And give them credit in your talk.
• Compfight: A website which does a better job searching Flickr.  Frankly it is just fun to look at ll the amazing photos.

Posted by Christian Sinclair on Thursday, February 25, 2010

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