Creating effective business presentations/Nonverbal Delivery Techniques/Visual Aids
| “ | People who use visual aids are 43% more persuasive than those who don't. | ” |
| —Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co. (3M) | ||
Read Section 11.4: Visual aids, in Saylor Academy (Ed.) 2012. Business Communication for Success. (See page(s) 444 - 455 in PDF version.)
This reading gives an overview of the characteristics, design, and display of various kinds of visual aids and their strategic uses to illustrate, complement, and reinforce verbal messages. Visual aids should enhance a presentation and can include:
- handouts
- drawings
- photos
- digital slides (for example using PowerPoint or other presentation software)
- charts or graphs
- 3D models
- film clips
We have hopefully all been in lessons and/or oral presentations when the speaker uses visual aids to make the content much more interesting, easier to understand, and more memorable. However, you may also be able to think of examples of visual aids not improving a lesson or presentation. If you have worked with visual aids yourself before, think about what you have learned from that experience.
Experiment with using PowerPoint or another presentation software of your choice to create a slide presentation of three slides with no more than one image and three words per slide to illustrate the informative presentation you created earlier in the course.
The following resources and websites may be of use:
Explore Visual Aid Creation Resources
- Open license and public domain images sources:
- Easy-use Media Creation Tools
- Animoto – Make short videos (30 secs) using images, music and text
- Photo Peach – Make audio slideshows with captions from images in Flickr, Picassa or Facebook
- SoundCloud – Make audio and music podcasts to accompany images
Visual Representation Examples
Add your presentation to your learning journal, along with a reflection on your learning from this lesson (around 250 words). Be sure to label or tag your post ccom102.
