Public speaking can be frightening – but it can also be a really effective way to share your ideas, inspire your teams, and develop your career as a technologist. This is a one-day workshop about how to create, refine and deliver great technical talks at conferences and technology meetups. It’s around 50% presentation and classroom-style training, and 50% collaboration and hands-on sessions. By the end of the day all of the attendees will have created and prepared two short (3-minute) talks, received some suggestions and audience feedback.
There were, genuinely, so many little moments where my mind was blown during Dylan’s workshop. I wish I had written all of it down, to better be equipped to share all of it. – Riz Khan, DDD East Midlands workshop attendee, July 2019
Course Content and Structure
Kick off
- Introduction and welcome. Who is everybody, and what are they hoping to get out of the event?
- What makes a great talk? What makes a bad talk, and how can you avoid it?
How to Design a Talk
- Collecting ideas, brainstorming, structures.
- Classic talk structures – the narrative, the ‘top ten’ list, the three-act play
- Pacing and timing – how do you know how much content to prepare?
Breakout session: Design a Talk.
Prepare a three-minute talk on any subject you like, without using any slides. You’re going to stand up and talk for three minutes, and everybody’s going to watch – and yes, if you’ve not done it before, it can be pretty scary. But it gets easier – I promise.
All presentations throughout the day will be recorded on video and shared with the attendees privately after the workshop, along with notes and feedback.
Presentation 1
Everybody delivers their three-minute talks. Depending on numbers, we may split into groups for this part of the session.
After each presentation, we’ll ask the rest of the group to share two pieces of feedback: one thing they liked, and one suggestion for improving the talk.
LUNCH
Understanding your audience
- How to pitch a talk. Submitting a “call for papers” (CfP), and adapting your material to suit different events.
- Etiquette and codes of conduct
- Using humour
- Dealing with feedback (here we’ll use the compliment/suggestion card feedback from the morning sessions)
- How to do a good question and answer session.
Slides and Visuals
- Why use slides, anyway?
- Tips and tricks
- Working with technical content
- Advanced PowerPoint
- Copyright and fair use
Presenting Technical Content
- The pros and cons of live coding demos
- Presenting diagrams and technical detail
Breakout: prepare a talk with slides
You’ll have three minutes to teach your audience something technical. Explain a system you’re working on, show us how to restring a guitar, or teach us how an autogyro works – any topic you like.
This time around, you’ll be expected to use slides, diagrams, and/or animation, and demonstrate some of the techniques we’ve discussed in the previous section of the workshop.
Presentations 2
As before, everybody will deliver the three-minute talk they’ve prepared. Depending on numbers, we may split into groups for this part of the session. After each presentation, we’ll ask the rest of the group to share two pieces of feedback: one thing they liked, and one suggestion for improving the talk.
Practical Tips and Disaster Recovery
- How to prepare for the things you can’t prepare for
- Preparation timelines and coping mechanisms
- Speaker horror stories (and why they weren’t that bad after all!)
Target Audience and Prerequisites
This workshop is aimed at anybody who wants to improve their public speaking and presentation skills. As part of the workshop, you’ll be preparing and delivering a short presentation using slides, so you’ll need to bring a laptop with PowerPoint, KeyNote or Google Slides running on it.
The ideal class size for this workshop is between 6–20 people. If you’d like to run it for a smaller or a larger group, please get in touch and let’s chat.
Upcoming Course Dates
No public dates are currently scheduled.
If you'd like to run this workshop for your team or at your conference, please get in touch
Alternatively, join the mailing list to find out when new course dates are announced.