PowerPoint Karaoke—Improving Improvisation
Goals: Learn how to improve your improvisation by presenting a PowerPoint slidedeck without ever seeing it.
Have you ever had something not go as planned during your meeting? Do you wish you could handle that with ease? Then, practice your improvisation skills by presenting slide decks you’ve never seen before. Billed as the “Newest Form of Corporate Embarrassment” by trendhunter.com, this is a great initiative for improvisation and how to work with unexpected challenges. Most of all, this team-building event is fun and funny; most likely, you’ll be in tears at least once during this event.
Time: 30–120 minutes
Participants: 1–120; unlimited for audience
Technology: Share Screen, PowerPoint, Google Slides or other presentation software
Category: Communication, creativity, teamwork, presentation
Instructions: You can use the PowerPoint decks we provide or you can instruct the attendees to build a 12-slide presentation ahead of time and send it to the organizer. You know what karaoke is, right? People who sing a song over music. Well, this is PowerPoint karaoke, where you present a slide deck you’ve never seen before. Before you present, you will be assigned a random slide deck. You will need to present your slide deck in five minutes or less. Points will be given for flow, gesture, jargon, credibility, and, of course, getting through all the slides.
Tips: If you use judges, you can have the judges give commentary after every presentation. Use a timer, if necessary, to keep your presenters on time. You can have one presenter or multiple presenters if you are working on getting teams to present.
Debrief: What roles or tactics did you use in designing the slides? How did you do in dealing with an unknown presentation from another person? Did you feel supported or set up to fail? What did you learn about dealing with unexpected challenges?
Case Study: We used PowerPoint Karaoke as part of the Northwest Event Show. During this event, it was great to watch what attendees put together as slides. Some slide decks were cohesive and helped the speaker with their presentation. Other teams put together very random slides next to each other, knocking the presenter for a loop each time they advanced
the slide. What was impressive was that the best presenters were able to take a difficult slide deck and make them fantastic (0:22 of video, see the Gyrotronic cycle with Fred), while one challenged presenter just read each slide on a slide deck about how to give a PowerPoint
presentation and, of course, what it said not to do: read a slide word for word (3:35 of video)!
Click to see SXSW BattleDecks 2008 on TrendHunter.com
Click to see 20+ Random PowerPoint Decks
Want to learn more?
Click to register for the Engaging Virtual Meetings Conference, every year in October.
http://engagingvirtualmeetings.com/conference
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