Giving presentations - OpenLearn - The Open University

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One way of going back to basics which usually works well is to switch off your computer and write out some rough sketches of your slides ? preferably using pen and paper! Then, after careful consideration, you should be able to put the appropriate technology to work for you in the way that you want it to. Remember to concentrate on the message and do not get carried away with the technology.

5.5 Create your own visual aid

Activity 10

Read this statement and sketch out on paper or in words what you think might work (on paper) as a visual aid: ?A typical UK home produces about 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year.?

Discussion

These were our ideas (summarised here as words) although we originally did this as drawings, scribbles and words on a large white board, all contributing and commenting as we went along.

We felt we needed to show how ?big? 2 tonnes is to the audience ? we could have done this by showing the amount of void space in a home (is it less, more or the same as 2 tonnes?). We could have estimated (or calculated) how much CO2 is made per day, per kettle boiled, or relate to some typical event and related this to something else like CO2 from cars, or factories. It did depend, however, on where (exactly) this CO2 came from and where it was emitted.

It was also important to know what the context was ? were there other types of emissions due to UK homes? Were homes the major CO2 emitters? Either way, it seemed that a graphic of a typical UK home would be useful, along with its typical characteristics (e.g. number of rooms, heating system, age, construction, inhabitants, etc.). This seemed like it could easily take two or three visuals.

Another idea we thought about was the use of smoke to represent the CO2, although we weren't sure if this was realistic. Could we use a smoky trail or picture in our visual? This got us to thinking about houses 100?150 years ago (when the environment would have been much smokier). Could we try and compare the amount of CO2 emitted back then to today? Or even 10 or 20 years ago? This could give some kind of historic trend which might be useful. We could express it as a chart (either a line or bar chart) or even in a basic table. If the data were very different we could try to determine how many ?fold? increase or decrease there has been over time ? like ?there is 4x more today than 10 years ago?. That would make for an interesting summary statement too.

The more we explored the potential visual ideas the more possibilities we seemed to find ourselves having. One could already sense that it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a very interesting story about CO2 emissions from UK homes.

This image shows a spider diagram. At the centre there is a circle inside which is written ?two tonnes of carbon dioxide?. Four arrows point out from this object. The first arrow points diagonally upwards towards the left. It points to a block of text stating ?It sounds like a lot?. Two arrows point from this block of text. The first points to text below it, which states ?What was it 100 years ago?? The second points to text above it, which asks ?How much ?space? would that take up??. Two arrows point upwards from this block. The first to a block of text asking ?How to convert tonnes to volume??. The second points to a block of text asking ?What is average UK house (volume) size??. The second arrow pointing away from the central object (two tonnes of carbon dioxide) points diagonally upwards towards the right. It points to a block of text which asks ?How much does a car make each year??. An arrow points upwards from this to a block of text stating ?Need to know amount of carbon dioxide per distance and number of miles each year?. There is a cartoon image of a car towards the left . Within the exhaust fumes is the scientific notation for Carbon dioxide. The third arrow pointing from the central object (two tonnes of carbon dioxide) points diagonally downwards and to the left. It points to a block of text which asks ?How much is that each day??. An arrow points to a circle on the right containing the equation ?tow tonnes over three hundred and sixty five days?. There is another </div> <h2></h2> <div id=
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