Saturday, October 04, 2008
What Great Group Speeches!!!!!
I really enjoyed hearing about your group activities and learning from your speeches as well as seeing you get to know each other a little better! Let's talk about visual aids now, fellow bloggers: What makes a great visual aid? What makes a stupid one? Should there be any writing on a visual aid or just an image? Tell us about a time you were in the audience for a speech and the visual either sucked or went horribly wrong. Did you just laugh or learn anything from some poor fool's blunder? Let me tell you, I have had kids pass their own dirty wallet or half-empty Starbucks latte around the class and try to pass it off as a visual aid, I have had pepper spray accidentally go off in class as a botched visual aid, I have had a dog bite someone during a pet-lovers speech and a student drew a happy face with her pencil on binder paper once for a visual and then there are the last minute "chalk-board artist" visual aid posers who try to act like they planned it ahead of time instead of forgetting the powerpoint slides....oh, sorry, this is not about ME....you go ahead. Wink--S Ps: Oh and during a lizard speech once an Iguana pooped on the podium.................
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34 comments:
Proper use of visual aids-- but not too many-- can make a big difference. Written ones should be brief and can be in the form of an outline. Main points in the presentation can be complemented with carefully selected images. Images and writing can also be combined. Visuals should flow in tandem with the speech, complementing it and helping the audience to follow/understand the subject.
One example of a bad use of visual aids was in a power point presentation where the fonts were too tiny to read from the back of the room-- I could barely make them out from the front! Another catastrophe was the use of images that were so washed-out and faded as to be practically invisible.
Bad visuals can really mess with a good speech!
Charles Bertolette
one of the most powerful speeches I've heard (in person) was given by David Mas Masumoto, a Central Valley peach farmer and author with a deep love of the land and a passion for conservation. His verbal descriptions of his Sun Crest peaches were enough to almost let you feel a warm peach on your tongue and juice running down your chin. His one visual aid was of course, a peach. The gentle way he held and admired this peach was a great was to underscore his theme and to connect with the audience.
-Kathleen Farren
Visual Aids can benefit as well as hinder one's presentation or speech. Thats of course, dependant upon a variety of things. Visual aids can be useful if aid is needed. It could help by allowing the audience to understand the theme/topic a bit more or even be an attention getter. Outlining a speech could give directionality of where such speech is going. With that said however, if the outline is too small or too detailed, this poses problematic because it ends up as a distraction rather than an "aid."
I have been a part of an audience where a person's power point presentation put me too sleep. Instead of looking at the audience, the speaker(s) ends up reading word for word from his/her power point. I could read for myself for goodness sakes! This also hindered his/her presentation because it suggests that he/she did not know the information prior to getting up at the podium.
Trang Khuu
For me, having to look at bad visual aids is like having to sit through a bad movie.
Powerpoint is the biggest drag for a visual aid. I think someone invented Powerpoint with the intention to torture us.
I enjoy short video clips as a visual aid. I grew up in the MTV era of the 1980s, and I must admit that a 3 minute and 30 second music video keeps my attention. The strongest visual aid I EVER SAW was when I was in the 5th grade a million years ago and we had to watch a government "DO NOT SMOKE CAMPAIGN" film. The film was one minute long and had a scary vampire sneaking into a lady's room at night. The lady is smoking like a chimney at her makeup table. The vampire attacks and bites her. Moments later, the vampire looks ill, coughs out smoke, and falls over dead. It was SO FUNNY! The teacher played the video several times. I never smoked because of that video. That was a great visual aid for the DO NOT SMOKE CAMPAIGN.
William
What makes a great visual aid?
This is your brain (an egg).... and this is your brain on drugs (a frying egg). This is the best visiual aid that I can think of right off the top of my head. It expands the point of the topic and makes its own statement without the speaker having to elaborate the meaning. So what makes a great visiual aid? Any aid, chart, graph, or photo that expands the point of the speech or message. The iguana would have been a perfect aid had the speaker been talking of how high maintenance reptiles are to keep as pets.
What makes a stupid one?
Just the opposite of a great one. A visiual aid that has nothing to do with the topic. The visual aid of the renaissance characters in the Snickers commercial. what the heck to minstrals, robin hood, friars, and royal fat dudes have to do with a candy bar? (OK I get the royal fat dude.)
Should there be any writing on a visual aid or just an image?
Writing does not distract from a visual aid, but excessive writing does. I do not need to read war and peace on a visual aid. The word "Radioactive" across a warning sign would be an example of appropriate verbage for a visual aid. Wr5iting should be bold an brief. It should get the point across directly.
Tell us about a time you were in the audience for a speech and the visual either sucked or went horribly wrong. Did you just laugh or learn anything from some poor fool's blunder?
I was once in the audience at a soccer clinic where the speaker trid to make the your brain/your brain on drugs joke. He held up a soccer ball and stated "this is your brain", and then held up a football and stated "this is your brain on drugs" It didn't have the impact he intended. I fetl embarrassed for the guy.
Sean Driscoll
I enjoyed the speeched last week, they were great, and I really liked our speech, and liked working on this speech, even though it was totally on internert that was sort of hard. but I like that expeirence.
Roxanne Harrington
i believe visual aids are great; they can bring accross what can not be imagined or beleivable unless seen with the eyes; visual aids can really make an impact whether good or bad.and it makes the speech memorable; because if the speech is not memorable then it really doesn't reach people; and a good speech should have visual aids with no words/content because the visual aids should definitely support the speech.
the time i had a heard a speech that was toughing was at a convention in las vegas, for my continuing education for my dental asst license. it made me cry. it was how this poor woman became rich because she had both parents on meth and she became homeless to avoid foster care and would show up to all her classes in high school, without a place to stay, no clothes, and would go to school everyday because she wanted to become a lawyer. and finally she got a full scholarship when her story was heard; she had visual pictures of her parents and where whe stayed during the terrible time in her life; and the point was no matter waht is going on in your life.....if you really have a goal it can be acheived...the task is don't give up. drusilla lang
sorry so long; couldn't make it any shorter. smile
oh, i was supposed to tell you about a speech that sucked; i guess it was one that was so boring i fell asleep; but yes, during the same convention a dentist tried to play a rap song and showed a picture of a known rap artist "soulja boy" who became rich and famous for his dance on his myspace page; and then te dentist compared it to the artist grades in school; but really it wasn't good visual aids because the artist is a millionaire and makes more money than the dentist; so it was not good; because he made himself look like he was a little jealous because he had 8 yrs of school and the artist barely graduated high school. drusilla lang
i remember at school we had a speaker talking about joing the alcorn foot ball team and all the pictures he showed us was blurry or had nothing to do with football. it was very funny. my teammates and i were laughing very hard.
Deyton
The way I look at visual aid is that it should be able to pull the attention of the audiences but at the same time when the speaker starts talking the audiences should not be hocked up to the Visual aid. It should have a very good balance.
The stupid visual aid are the ones that are too busy and looses the focuses of the speaker. At times I see some visual aid has to many bright pictures and very large fonts.
It all depends. If it’s a very formal I would like to see bullet points and with very few images.
I was in a training class when the trainer had so much text on the PowerPoint presentation that to a point where I was just not listening to her , rather reading all the text. When the visual aid is poor no matter how good the presenter is most of the time it does not come out great.
I take it as a learning curve. Because I always tell myself that this can happen to me if I am not well prepared. This gives me the fear to be ready when I need to present anything.
Parneet
A great visual aid would be something very simple for the audience to grasp th etopic at hand. Some stupid visual aids are graphs when you don't understand them. When presenting to a group I think it is a great idea to have a visual aid and an image. That might be able to help someone who may not understand one way, but can relate to the other. I have never been in an audience were the visual sucked or went horribly wrong. I can tell you that I may have went to sleep on a boring sppech.
Valenthia Carlock
I once had a public speaker come to my high school and speak about being a good person, being able to avoid peer pressure and not being afraid to be ourselves. I was a freshmen at the time and the speech was for all freshmen at the school so that's why the topic was about being your own person i guess you can say. But towards the middle of his speech he pulled out a real hundred dollar bill (and we knew it was real because he had a person from my class look at it and feel it) and he tore it up. Just tore it up into four pieces. Now i don't really remember what point he was trying to make about ripping up a hundred dollar bill. But needless to say it must have not been a very strong point if i can't remember why he did. After all it was a hundred dollar bill not a one dollar bill.
Johnny Sweeten
What makes a great visual aid?
like leo and his group presented in class on 10.06.08 gave us great examples of excellent visual aids. it also gave examples of bad ones. i personally believe every visual aid serves a different purpose, so if it calls for writing, leave writing in, if it doesnt, dont.
there was this one time in highschool when a fellow classmate brought in a visual aid during her speech about martin luther king jr. and brought in pictures that were so blurry you could not decipher what the picture depicted; also they were on 3X5 flash cards... so overall they were impossible to see and the blurry images made it impossible to make out what anything was.
I was in a class learning how to use auto-injection pens. These auto-injectors dispense individual doses of medication to slow/prevent the effects of chemical and biological weapons. The instructor had both practice injectors and actual injectors on display; the practice injectors have no needles or medication, while the actual injectors have both needles and medication. Unfortunately for the instructor, he picked up the wrong one to demonstrate the actions required to activate the device. You can immagine the look that he had on his face when he felt the needle plunge into his thigh. Fortunately, there were plenty of paramedics in the class to provide medical care for him, and get him to the hospital.
J.A.D. Jackson
what make a great visual aid? According to my modest experience, I believe that visual aids can be great if it helps the audience clarify an ambiguous point and/or to enhance a position you hold against an argument such us statistics, authority, and anecdote. However, those visual aids should be coherent, clear, and have a purpose, or they will turn to a stupid visual aids that will make you look confused and not mastering the subject regardless of how good was the speech.
I believe that a visual aid can be an image or a writing as long as the visual aid will bring some change to the presented topic.
Fortunately, I haven't been in an audience for a speech and the visual aids went wrong, but I had a couple teachers in high school who usually forget their visual aids and skip some very important materials.
~ Issam Zejli
I think a lot of people make the mistake of not going through their presentation WITH the visual aid beforehand. Most people focus more on what they are going to say rather than what can go wrong AND WILL go wrong, my junior research project being a prime example. Our project was on Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and in addition to a PowerPoint presentation, we decided to act out a short scene from one of the plays. We made our own props, including a paper tree, which proceeded to fall down every two seconds during our act. At the end of the scene, when we had thought the worst was over, the drama enthusiast of our group who decided to play the main role decided to improvise. The scene was SUPPOSED to end with a fight where the main character (played by the drama freak) knocks a plate off of a table. Drama Freak took it a little to far and with all his might, swiped the plate off the table, and sent it whizzing by our teacher's head. On top of that, our lovely PowerPoint presentation would not work on our teacher's computer, so we had to read printed out copies to the audience. Despite the endangerment of our teacher's life, with got a B.
i think there should be pictures and writing on the visual aids so that they can be explained better. a bad visual aid, like you said is the last minute on the chalk board when they are writing out everything they are saying and arent facing the audience, its really boring. danielle hansen
What makes a great visual Aid?
In my opinion a visual aid is always a good prop to have if trying to sway, inform or or just give life to a topic. Visual aids can bring a postiive in doing a speech, it can give the audience a better understanding of the topic being discussed, it can get a message across with pictures it has on it, some of the most common visual aids are powerpoint, posters, short clips, object, in my opinion it always makes the project fun if you draw and create the the visual aid. However; a visual aid can hurt a person speech if the visual aid is not well thoughtout, or just thrown together, for example I was taking a Art history class and we had done power point for our visaul aid a student has wrtten some words on the slide that were in like 2 pts font,I kid you not.lol having a important piece of information on a slide that is suppose to represent you speech has to be bigger to read.
An visual aid should should be thought out carfully and done in a well manner, that will leave the audience with a understanding of the topic being discussed.
Victoria Smith
I think a GREAT visual aid contains LITTLE or no words. I mean it is called a VISUAL aid : ) Thats just me though. I think too much writing takes away from the speech itself and can distract the audience. I love visual aids that incorporate pictures or images that you WON'T forget. I think color is important as well. Also, it I don't think it always has to be in the form of a poster, I mean you can pass around brochures, or pictures or even bring in LIVE visual aids if possible : )-Which could turn out to be a disaster. I think a STUPID visual aid is one that just has a bunch of writing on it, with no color or images, and is unorganized.
In my chemistry class someone passed around a TINY piece of magnesium as his visual aid. It was SO SMALL that you could barely see it. That wasn't a great visual aid to me. I think the the visual aid is important and enhances your speech. I have learned that it is usually better to pass things out after your speech though, if your are going that route. That way the audience actually pays attention to you while you are speaking.
The visual aid that has sood out to me the most in the last three years has been the giant image of an aborted fetus. A anti-abotion group stationed itself on the main walkway next to the bookstore. They had giant billboards, by giant I mean four by ten feet. The billboards had the image of a mutilated fetus. The billboards also contained the line "Do you still think that it's not a life yet?"
The visual aid was very impactful, but at the same time it was innappropriate. If someone is going to show something that graphic, they have to give some kind of an "explicit image warning/graphic image warning," just like television shows. What if a child would have seen that horrible image? In fact, they were stationed about 200 feet from the childcare center.
The image was very impactful, but innapropriate for the audience given proper warning.
-Javier Pasillas
Visual aids should be attention getters because it helps ones speech out and makes more sense to understand the speech sometimes. A good visual should hit all the important facts about the specific topic and a bad one would just be something that has uneccessary topics on it and it will just confuse the audience more. For example, when I was in junior high school I had did an awesome visual aid about a Siberian Tiger on Powerpoint that I received a B on. I did a lot of research on the tiger and only put the important characteristics about the tiger in my powerpoint I made sure that I stayed on topic by just talking about that specific tiger.
Keturah Guary
A great visual aid should move an audience and further support ur thesis. It can be an image or have words on it as long as it is simple, easy to understand, and drives your point home. A bad visual aid would be something that is unclear, made last minute, or hard to see. I remember in previous English classes some students would draw a visual aid with a pencil and binder paper. I've also seen other people try to fit too much information on a poster and it becomes hard to read and confusing.
I think Team Glue Sticks did an excellent job with their lesson on Visual Aids. They were so amazing and did a fantastic job. The way they explained visual aids made me think a lot about how I will be giving my speeches now. Leo did an exceptional job with explaining PowerPoint’s. Keeping PowerPoint’s simple and NOT DISTRACTING is a very important part. You can use both pictures and words, but make sure they are relevant to what you are saying at the time you are showing it. The animations included in PowerPoint can be tempting to use, but most of them are very distracting. Animations should be used to emphasis specific parts of speeches or they can be a liability during the speech. I had an English teacher who included animal sounds in her PowerPoint. Although in some ways it was entertaining, most of the class found themselves trying to pick out what animal it was and not learning anything about rhetorical criticism. I'm not sure if that's what we were learning about, it just sounded cool.
-Leo Novakovskiy
I am sorry to say that I really haven't seen that many bad visuals. I have always been in classes with very artistic and technological people, so even if their presentation was of questionable nature the visuals were very good. So either I am not that observant and my sleep has over lapped bad presentations or I am just that lucky. Although, I so not recommend using a neon colored board and then wearing primary colors in your outfit it is kind of hard to look at both at the same time.
On the Wednesday after our group presentations, my English class was also doing chapter presentations. The "visual aid" that they had passed out was embarassing. Everything was listed, left-aligned, with no spaces, or colors, or font/size changing in between. The speakers read from their own supportive explanations, which made it really hard to find where they were at on the hand-out. I don't know if it were a last minute plan put together just before class, but it was wretched. I laughed because it was the apitomy of bad visual aid. Oh, they also passed out candy to emphasize the appeal of... I don't remember what, becasue both the visual aids left little impression of their significance.
~Lacey M. Schneider
Visual aid are important, especially when you are trying to describe an object or explain a process. I took a class of History Civilization a long time ago and this teacher used a lot of slide shows. The classroom was huge with an enormous projector screen, like a mini threatre. Everytime he had pictures to show, I was always excited to watch and listen. Durng every slide show, he would always explained it thoroughly, follow by a personal story. Even though he shared a lot of his personal stories of where he been to in the world, he does it with enthusiasm. With his energy, you can tell the teacher has passion for the subject. He sure didn't need any writings on his visual aid.
Writings on visual aid are ok, as long as they are kept at a minimum. Being prepared with your speech and visual aid, everything should go smoothly. Making backup plans in case something doesn't go right is always a plus.
I believe a good visual aid consist of simple fonts, bold colors, and is large enough for everyone to see. A bad visual aid is one that has distracting content, such as ridiculous fonts, neon colors, and exaggerated pictures. I believe that when you present a visual aid, there should be both writing and a picture. I think that having a picture alone will make the audience think too hard and having words alone will make them more attracted to your visual than your talking. I don't recall any recent memories of seeing bad visual aids, but when I went to university for school, professors always lectured off of power point slides. It really sucked because most professors just repeat what the slide says and it made most students sleepy and bored (including yours truly)...
Jason Wong
Good use of visual aids can really make an impact on how the audience will recieve the message u try to convery in your speech. A visual aid should have just about enough information to help the audience follow along. If you put too much information on there, then you might end up reading off it. Also, the aid must be organized. For me, having to listen to a speech whose visual aid is unorganized and does not make sense is an invitaion to come and fall asleep. Writtings and images may both work, as long as they are limited and do not overpower the speech itself. I once had a classmate give a speech witha powerpoint as him visual image. Turns out he used the wrong background colors and the fot colors to mix together, and his font was too smal to be read. Thus he was confused himself, and the stress caused teh poor guy to not remeber what he was supposed to say. LoL this is horrible but i actually learned to have my powerpoints be prepapred from teh audiences' point of view.
Anum Saif
I think that visual aids are great since some people retaine inforamrion better when they see it. I think that writting is ok on a visual aid but it needs to be big enough for people to see it and not to much. I have seen visual aids were the person put almost their whole speech on it and that was to much and took away from the diagram that she was trying to show. It should be something to help you present your speech and to show the audiance what you are trying to say. They should be clear and dark.
Miranda Fuglsang
Visual aids are a great accessory for a speaker to deliver more impact on his or her speech. It should visually complement the speaker's general topic. Some informative speeches really need visual aids that fully illustrate the objects or things that the speaker cannot justify in plain words and gestures such as in medical, showing a picture of the human skeletal anatomy or how the human reproductive system works could not just be expressed in words and gestures but will be most effective if the speaker has a poster or a powerpoint presentation to support his topic. Good, effective visual aids should be appropriately presented to the audience too. Not because the speaker is speaking about guns that he or she is allowed to bring the real object just to emphasize or show the point. So to me, a good, effective visual aid really helps if the speaker would learn to choose the proper medium, may it be the real object, photo, poster, or powerpoint as a visual aid and present it to complement and enhanced his or her speech and make it memorable to the audience.
A real bad presentation of visual aid for me is overuse of images and words with bad combination of colors and unreadable fonts and most of all, too many text to read. After all, the speaker should be speaking and not just reading word per word from the visual aid.
To me, a stupid use of visual aid is when the visual aid has absolutely nothing to do with the main topic.
Marie Parker
I am such a visual leaner that with out some type of visual aid or hands on interaction I would probably fall asleep and or get annoyed if I had to listen to a speech that wasn't entertaining to begin with. Visual aids are suppose to complement what you have to say, it shouldn't overpower or be the main source of your speech. I hate when you get a teacher that not only reads directly from the powerpoint but they created the powerpoint based on the book. Now, thats a waste of time. You should think of visual aids as being an accent to your speech.
OLISA JOHNSON
I totally agree with William that powerpoint presentations as visual aids are a real drag, because they really are torture! Especially if they have to turn off the lights in order to view it. I don't know about you, but when the lights go out my body automatically thinks it's time to go to bed, so that's when my attention get's lots and my head starts bobbing and weaving! The best visual aids were in my anatomy classes when we actually had plastic models as shown in chapter 12 on pg 321 of the text. Those were some of my favorites, because I am a very visual person so that helped me remember when it cam time to take a test. The worst visual aid was when I was at a conference and someone used a football in his presentation and he threw it into the crowd, and because he threw it too high it hit the chandelier above, and the chandelier almost fell on most of the audience. That was a nightmare! Needless to say visual aids can be very instrumental to a person's presentation as long as they are thought out and executed properly.
~Ms. Dee Dee Chambers
visual aides can either make the speech or the break speech if its tacky than it will distract a potential great speech, if the visuals are dynamite than it can overpower a bad speech or make a great speech evan better.
Sincerely Janelle Tyler
visual aids are very important in any presenatation. Lots of time the information shared are great but the person prsenting could had not been clear but if he or she has the visual aid it makes it easy for the people to follow. But at the same time at times the person prsenating is great but not the Visual aid to follow throught.
Parneet
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